www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 22
The science of government through measurements of the success of government's efforts
This chapter contains a summary of The Social Health of the Nation, How America is Really Doing, by Marc Miringoff and Marque-Luisa Miringoff. The authors provide important information that helps us know if all of us are sharing equally in the benefits of our civilization. Since they provide much more information than can be repeated in this book, you might choose to purchase their book to get a more complete picture of this important subject. Along with some added history, their book provides the social facts about the U.S. that are repeated here.
It is not possible to use a single meter to directly measure our happiness and well-being, the quality of our lives and of our connections to family and community, or the level of social and economic justice within our society. But we can begin to describe these things in terms of a sufficient number of more specific, directly measurable aspects of life. Sociologists provide us with important numerical quantities, which are called social health indicators, that enable us to make quantitative statements about our well-being and about our ability to provide for the happiness and needs of our children and communities (remember that being a social primate means that we each innately choose to form a mutually beneficial society rather than “going it alone”). Each social health indicator measures a specific aspect of our lives and community.
The indicators are measured answers to many questions: What portions of our wages are spent on food, rent, health care, transportation, and utilities? Do we have a general access to shelter, food, clean water, clothing, and the utensils of daily life? Do we feel we have quiet, privacy, and safety in our home? Some well-being and quality-of-life measures include the amount and quality of food, the amount and quality of education, equal access to education, affordable housing, the quality of housing, safety from external invaders, infant mortality, general access to medicine and health care, life expectancy, child abuse, social inequality, upward mobility, hunger, illiteracy, crime and imprisonment rates, the number of children growing up in household environments that sometimes lead to later criminal behavior, illegal drug trade and usage, quality of our friendships, job satisfaction and dignity, job safety and injuries, job security, the effects of the job on our family life, hours spent per week with our children, the degree to which our job contributes to a sense of community and society, quality of leisure time, the state of race relations, income inequality between classes and groups, the portion of us who live in poverty, access to beginning the career or business of our own choosing, level of satisfaction with recent transactions with the personnel of small and big business and with government officials, belief that the government responds to our concerns and that we can cause changes to occur in the government, confidence in public officials, strength of public participation, the number of books sold per person each year, the number of hours spent per week discussing societal issues and possible solutions to newly revealed troubles, the level of our children's joy, having enough money to handle a sudden crisis, feelings of general morality, suicide rates, belief that things will or will not be better for our children, feelings that our children are happy and have what they need, cultural diversity, feelings of being a member of the community, the existence of a community meeting place for recreation and the discussion of mutual problems, places to explore nature, and the quality of community life. We also want to know whether society is allowing us time to imagine and to feel wonder, love, and gratitude.
There are hundreds of indicators. We combine first those indicators describing what we have decided to be the most important aspects of being human. When a sufficiently large number of indicators, covering a wide range of aspects of our lives, are combined they begin to quantitatively measure our well-being, the quality of our lives, the level of our happiness and of our opportunity to pursue the limits of our individual talents and abilities, social and economic justice within our community, the strength and quality of our community, the cooperative spirit of give-and-take within our community and the satisfaction each of us gains from being a member. In total, the indicators measure the general well-being and level of our happiness–things which comprise the stated purpose of the governments of the world. The combined set of indicators gives us a way of measuring the success of our attempts to govern ourselves.
We have seen that we form government to help organize and operate our society. In its earliest forms, it often served to organize irrigation projects and the storage and redistribution of the resulting crops. We saw that the role of government in our everyday lives increased in response to the social consequences of our shift from farming to industrialization. Today, the citizens of each nation specify what it means to be governed by legally defining the role of their own government. The government obtains legitimacy by gaining the consent of its citizens to be governed in the specified manner. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution define government in the U.S. These two documents say that to govern is to promote the general welfare and the pursuit of happiness, establish justice, effect safety and happiness, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and to secure life, rights, and the blessings of liberty. These elements of government can be measured in terms of hundreds of indicators, giving us a way to measure the success of our attempts to govern ourselves.
Civilization is our cultural adaption for managing groups of people larger than our innate band of twenty to two hundred persons, and it our collection of tools and procedures meant to make life better for all of us. Social health indicators provide us with information about the numerical magnitude of problems, and continued monitoring tells us whether or not our attempts to improve these conditions are in fact working. We know our attempts are working if life is getting measurably better for all of us. A meaningful goal for our mutual civilization is for it to provide the largest level of benefit for the greatest number of persons within our population. We want to minimize inequality because its injustice is contrary to our innate predisposition to participate in the exchange of assistance that builds a mutually beneficial society. We have seen that we exchange assistance on any task larger than can be done by a single individual, including the building and operation of our civilization.
Since they directly relate to all aspects of the quality of our daily lives, social health indicators are of more interest to us citizens than are the economic indicators. Whenever we citizens publicly question our elected officials we more often ask about these quality of life issues than about economic indicators or about business or corporate issues. The real measure of progress for our society is not given by the Gross National Product and stock market averages; instead, progress in promoting life for all of us is better given in terms of social indicators. The more indicators used, the more complete will be the picture they provide of life within our civilization.
Notice that the social health indicators are only sporadically mentioned in the news while many economic indicators–for example, stock market averages–are reported on a second-by-second basis. Many economic measures are discussed in the news with a life-and-death urgency, but they measure only the economic aspects of our society. The political, economic, social, medical, psychological and artistic-intellectual aspects of our civilization are very much interrelated. In particular, every one of the above-mentioned social health indicators are intertwined such that changes in any one of them affects each of the others. Unfortunately, the daily news often treats them as if they are unrelated. Notice also that the portion of daily news spent on each of these things gives us an idea of what is most important to the leaders of our society.
Some of the social health indicators result from surveys and polls of the general population. Even those items that are simply ratings of personal feelings provide useful information on an ongoing basis. Today’s mail and internet allows us to compile on a continual basis everyone's input on a large set of measures of our well-being and the quality of our lives. The more millions of respondents the better (see www.UsHumans.net). The daily news often contains the results of public opinion polls. "Scientific" polls and surveys are those that involve merely one thousand respondents who have been carefully selected to include one of each "type" of person throughout society. They attempt to produce the same result as would occur from polling the entire population. The internet will soon make it affordable to conduct perpetual polling of everyone. For example, visit www.harrisinteractive.com and http://pollingreport.com.
By the way, would you like to know how many persons were involved in a poll you recently saw? We often see an expected error given along with the results of a poll. The larger the number of respondents, the smaller the error is expected to be. When a yes or no question is asked then the error in the answer grows in the same way that it does when flipping a coin. After flipping many times, the difference between the number of heads and tails grows as the square root of the number of tosses. For example, toss one hundred times and the difference between head and tail counts will be about ten. For one thousand tosses that difference is about thirty, and the fractional error in the count-difference is then 30/1000 = 0.03. This means that the fractional error in a two-choice random event grows as one over the square root of the number of choosers. Inversely, it means that the number of choosers grows as one over the square of the reported error. In a yes-no poll, the number of persons involved in the poll is given by one over the square of the reported error. For example, when the error is reported to be plus or minus 3%, which can also be written as the fraction 0.03, then the poll involved about 1/0.032 = 1,100 persons.
Some specific social health indicators
The Miringoffs describe changes through the years 1970–1996 in sixteen social health indicators for the people of the United States. There is room to discuss only a few of them here. You might like to read their entire book to get a more complete picture of the social health of the nation. You might also like to check the websites of various U.S. agencies to see the latest figures; to compare figures for other nations, you might like to look at the publications of the United Nations. Some websites and printed reports are listed below. For example, the number of people in the U.S. who do not have health insurance is described in the U.S. Census Bureau’s report Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2002, which can be seen at www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p60-223.pdf. The United Nations compares the per capita cost of health care in every nation of the world at http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indic/indic_52_1_1.html. It shows that people in the U.S. spend twice as much on health care as do people in Europe and ten or twenty times as much as do the people in most every other nation. Visit www.unesco.org/culture/worldreport/html_eng/stat2/table29.pdf for an international comparison of five types of social security. How does your nation compare? The World Bank’s Global Links Television has video clips of society in various nations, see http://web.worldbank.org. Visit http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/socind for international comparisons of some social indicators.
From the start, the Miringoffs explain the meaning of the well-being and quality-of-life social health indicators. They warn that some of us might say "Who cares about a person's unemployment or condition of poverty because it's their own fault." But, invalid stereotypes aside, the indicators do not describe just an individual. They measure the success or failure of our civilization as a whole. We have seen that instead of going it alone, humans are innately predisposed to cooperate in a society that we demand be mutually beneficial. The indicators measure the success of our attempts in building a just society.
We all agree that the success or failure of a particular individual depends not only on internal talent and drive but also on many external forces and obstacles–opportunity, or its denial, for one. We will know that we will have finished building the fully just civilization when no one is denied the opportunity to go where their talents and desires wish. Another external factor is that the point in the social and economic hill at which we begin our climb at birth determines how easy the movement is going to be throughout our lifetime. (We saw that to be totally free of constraints today requires one to have been born a millionaire.) We are all striving to improve, and after a lifetime's effort–if the hill hasn't grown more steep–we each will have had similar percentage increases in our positions on the hill. Is the hill more steep or less steep for you than it was for Pharoah and Lafeyette?
The point is that these indicators measure the well-being of our society and the relations among all of us, and are as real as the lives they represent. They are not "mere examples of private misfortune." If you list the external obstacles that have impeded your progress up the hill you will likely find a similar list from others who have had a similar starting point. Those who start below you will have a longer list of obstacles. Together, we can next strive to reduce the obstacles we’ve identified.
The infant mortality rate, which involves death within the first year of life, has been found to be a sensitive measure of our society's sanitary and health conditions and of our ability to protect the most vulnerable of us. Since it has been found to be sensitive even to small changes in technology and public policy, it is also a measure of the effectiveness of our public policies in applying our base of technical health knowledge. A poor rate has been seen to be easily improved. The Miringoffs explain that in the U.S. by 1996 it has been reduced 64% from its 1970 value of 7.3 deaths per 1,000 births (there was a total of 28,487 infant deaths in 1996). The latest available figure, which is for the year 2004, show that our infant mortality rate is 6.5. This is an all-time low, but thirty other nations have a lower rate. You can see how the nations of the world compare today by visiting www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html. You can see other comparisons at www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/profileguide.html.
We saw that in the early 1800s, about one in five or six (180 per 1,000) of us died before reaching our first birthday. In the year 1900 the rate was still about one in six (160 per 1,000) but became twenty-five times better by the year 2000. We also have seen that a recent benefit of our science and technology has been that we less often die of simple illnesses. A meaningful goal for our civilization is to reduce the number of us whose life is unnecessarily shortened. We hate to think of a child dying from a simple cut only because antibiotics were not available and affordable. We all agree that each human born is as equally deserving of a full life as is every other human.
The Centers for Disease Control have found that the infant mortality rate is 60% higher when the mother lives in poverty–regardless of the mothers age, smoking habits, or amount of prenatal care. The gap between white and black mortality rates has increased since 1970. Congenital anomalies, prematurity, low birth-weight, Respiratory Distress Syndrome, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, whose reduction is accounting for much of the recent improvement, are the four leading causes of infant death. The low birth-weight problem has worsened since 1984. It accounts for two-thirds of infant deaths that occur in the first twenty-eight days.
Handelman shows that the governments of some nations have performed very well in reducing infant mortality rates. During the years 1970 through 1995, Oman has succeeded in reducing its rate from 280 down to 25–a 90% reduction. Saudi Arabia reduced its rate by 82% from 185 down to 34. Chile's rate dropped 87%, being reduced from 105 to 15. The rate in Barbados dropped 81%, from 81 to 10. South Korea dropped its rate from 71 to 9, which is an 87% decrease. Cuba cut its rate by 81%, from 54 to 10. And Singapore's rate dropped from 30 to 6, which is an 80% decrease.
The international definition of poverty is having an income less than half a nation's median amount. If half of us make more money than you do, and half make less, then you are earning that median income. (This is a bit different than the average wage.) Each of us making less than half that median income is considered to be living in poverty. The percentage of a population living below the poverty line is a measure of economic inequality in the social system of that people, and indicates the number of persons being left out of the actions, goals, and priorities of the system. (For information, see http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032004/pov/toc.htm or www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty.html. www.lisproject.org/keyfigures/povertytable.htm has some international comparisons.)
The Miringoffs explain that from 1970 to 1996, the Social Security System of the people of the United States reduced the portion of our elderly that live in poverty from 25% to 11%. But this still means that about one in ten of our grandparents are living in poverty; many other nations have better records. (We saw in Chapter 15 that the U.S. Social Security program began in the 1930s in response to the poverty of older workers.) A recent trouble for our elderly is that they are spending 20% to 50% of their income on medicine. This recently increased expense cancels part of their increased income. Many more would be considered to be living in poverty if we instead compared their income that remained after medical fees to the nation's median income. The elderly poverty rate is a measure of how we live in the last decades of our lives. The Miringoffs state that the future challenge will be to live long well.
In previous centuries, a person was far more likely to die before reaching the age of one. If you also managed to survive through childhood then you were likely to live to a ripe old age. We saw that in the U.S. around the year 1800, about one in four or five of us would die before reaching the age of twenty-one. In 1900, anyone who lived to be sixty-five years old could expect to live another twelve years. Today, that has increased by 5.5 years to 17.5 years. The life expectancy of a sixty-year-old person today is a measure of retired well-being–and of our health system for retirees, too.
The Miringoffs explain that the life expectancy of a newborn increased from 70.8 to 76.1 years during the period 1970 to 1996. In 2004, 25% of the nations of the world have a longer life expectancy than occurs in the U.S. (The website www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html contains an international comparison). The life expectancy of a newborn in the United States varies from 57.9 to 89.5 depending on our race, gender, and location (there is much less variation in Europe). For some affluent Asian counties, the life expectancy of men and women is 89.5 and 95 years. For those of us Native American males who live in South Dakota reservations, our life expectancy is 56.5. For those of us black American males who live in central cities, our life expectancy is 57.9. These two life expectancy rates are among the worst in the industrialized world. This indicates that there is much to be done in the United States to attain the ideals stated in our founding documents. When we get serious, we will accomplish this in a single generation. We already know that it simply begins with the care of our newborn infants.
Housing is considered to be affordable when it consumes less than 30% of the household’s income. The Miringoffs explain that affordable housing has become more available at times but less available at other times. Reynolds reports that 40% of us owned our home in 1945 but 60% did so in 1960. In 1949, the United States made a commitment to ensure decent and affordable housing for every American renter by building 810,000 low-income units (like the Horner complex in which Lafeyette and Pharoah lived). The result was that by 1970 there were 6.5 million low-income housing units for the 6.2 million of us who were low-income renters–a surplus of 300,0000 units. In 1995 there were still 6.1 million units but for a total of 10.5 million low-income renters–a shortage of 4.4 million units.
In 1996, rent, utilities, and related insurance and taxes took an average of 27% of the renter's income. In 1995 the Department of Housing and Urban Development stated that 12.5 million people either lived in severely substandard housing–again, Lafeyette and Pharoah's story puts life into this number–or paid more than half their wages for rent. This is 5% of our nation's 250 million persons but one in seven of our renters. This number did not decrease despite robust economic growth for our nation's businesses. When we are forced to pay 25% to 50% of our income for rent then we have little left for food, health care, clothing, education, and entertainment. Such restricted resources lead to a restricted life and affects all other aspects of our society. From 1970 to 1996, a steady 65% of Americans families owned their own homes, but the number of young families who could afford their own home decreased from 40% to 30%. You might visit the website of the Department of Housing and Urban Development at www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing/index.cfm. See also http://childstats.gov. By the way, the price of homes in many cities has increased to such an extreme that it is threatening to create an entire class of “un-homed peasants.”
In previous chapters, we encountered the educational systems of a few representative groups of us humans. We have seen how gatherer-hunter people train their children to find and prepare food and to make tools and shelters and such. We saw that any Kalapalo individual who had the interest would ask another to teach him or her the procedures of a certain ceremony or the arts of a shaman. We saw the children of ancient Mesopotamia learning to read and write and to do arithmetic in the open-air classroom, but we also saw that education was mostly limited to the children of upper-class officials, priests, and administrators. The children were being trained to be scribes to handle official communication and business contracts and to keep palace and temple records. They had hopes of becoming judges or maybe the ruler of a town or district. Their education enabled them to be the operators of the royal palace and temple complexes–and so play important roles in the city's economic and social activities. We saw that universities of higher education in Europe, China, and the Islamic Equator began to appear about one thousand years ago. In Europe, schools grew from their beginnings as centers training priests, while schools in China were training students for the bureaucratic entrance exams. Education was still accessible only for the children of the wealthiest of us and was a tool for climbing higher on the social ladder.
In the farming communities of New England in 1800, we have seen that children went to school when the agricultural schedule permitted spare time and that many parents felt it was only important for children to read and write well enough to study the Bible and to check the arithmetic on a bill or invoice. Each neighborhood school served the children who lived within walking distance and was funded by each family bringing loads of hay, wood, or crops. The school would trade or sell these items to obtain school supplies. (Today's parent chooses between public, private, or home-schooling and fund the public schools through local and state taxes. visit www.unesco.org/culture/worldreport/html_eng/stat2/table24.pdf for an international comparison of educational funding.) In the more remote regions of the country we could learn the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic only if our parents could teach them to us. If we chose to learn a trade, we did not attend a trade-school but signed a contract with a person of that trade who would teach it to us in return for our work. We often lived in the home of the teacher as a member of the family. About 150 years ago we began to make elementary education available to everyone throughout much of the industrializing world. This was a meaningful step toward our destination of the fully-just civilization. The people of the United States made progress in removing the denial of educational opportunity when we stood up in the 1960s to demand that "everyone" meant all of us, not just those of us who are white.
In previous chapters we have also seen what some of us have had to say about the purpose of education. Confucius pointed out that education civilizes the people, establishes good social customs and brings order to the country. He said that people have a good nature; you have to force it to be otherwise. Education and culture prevent a clouding of our good nature. Confucianism understands the crucial role of the teacher and has many guidelines for schools and teachers. People have a small self-concern for food and material possessions but a great self-concern for ideas. When we nourish ideas, we lose interest in material possessions. Islam stresses obligation of everyone to teach their knowledge to others, and that there is a religious obligation to improve and administer society and to develop science, industry, technology, and human potential.
We see in the Miringoffs figure that our high school drop out rate has improved, but again, our performance ranks among the worst of the older industrialized nations. In the United States, 72% of us complete high school, while in New Zealand, Finland, and Japan 93%, 98% and 99% of us do so. (For international comparisons, you might like to visit www.unicef.org/sowc03/tables/index.html.) In the United States, about 28% of those of us aged 25–29 have completed college. But for the people of forty-five out of fifty states today, one person in ten cannot afford to attend any college at all.
Today's average annual earnings are $15,000 for high school drop outs, $22,000 for high school graduates, $38,000 for college graduates, and $61,000 for professionals. Since the average annual wage of all persons is $24,000 we see that our wage depends on our educational level: high school graduates earn about the average wage, college graduates earn 50% more, and those of us who do not finish high school earn 50% less than that average. Recent unemployment rates are 0.7% for professionals, 2.4% for college graduates, 5.5% for high school graduates, and 10.9% for high school drop outs. For a comparison of unemployment rates around the world, see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/socind/unempl.htm. By the way, simply becoming unemployed today means that one’s creditors will likely charge $1,000 in penalties and late fees during the next sixty days; this can be enough to send a person into bankruptcy–except that the banking industry has recently convinced our government to make it harder to declare bankruptcy.
Our children had better be given as much education as possible before they reach the seventh grade and begin to make the life-and-death decisions of today's big cities–as we saw for Lafeyette and Pharoah. Education decreases economic misery and increases opportunities and choices in life. This should not be such a secret. It should be mentioned every day in high school as one reason to stay in school. Those of us who do not finish high school have little choice in occupation. We are forced to take whichever job comes along and barely have money for food and rent. This drop-out rate affects the lives of individuals–and of their children’s, too–through reduced wages, reduced civic participation, and higher unemployment.
The average annual income of the entire population is $24,000 while for medical surgeons it is $180,000, see www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291067.htm. (See www.bls.gov/oes/oes_emp.htm for wages by industry or region and see www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncar0002.pdf for a list of 450 occupations ranked by wage.) If you obtain all of your income from wages then $24,000 per year corresponds to $12 per hour, and $5.15 per hour, which is the minimum wage, corresponds to $10,700–as long as no vacation is taken during the year. The annual earnings considered to fall at the poverty line are $7,500 for an individual but $9,500 for a two-person home and $16,400 for a four-person home. This is 1.5 times the annual wage of $10,700 for a person earning the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. In the United States, the minimum wage was raised regularly from 1974 to 1981 but we allowed it to remain unchanged from 1981 through 1989 though the cost of living was increasing.
Actually, the economic benefit of education makes for trite bait compared with the rewards that come from knowledge and knowledgeable citizens. The real purpose of high school is to experiment with each and every subject to find the one that grabs our passion, knocks us off our feet, and fires us up for the rest of our life. Samples of every subject must be given and taken during high school so that we are not deprived of stumbling onto our passion. For example, we cannot know if anthropology stirs us until we take a course in it and find out what it is about. Each of these subjects exists because they are a part of what a human is and does; they are each a celebration of being human. With each new thing we learn or accomplish, we become a fuller person, a more-engaged citizen, and increase our contribution to the progress of humankind. Education gives us knowledge from the experience of billions of persons through thousands of years rather than having to invent everything for ourselves. Education today is more than job training at public expense and more than an introduction to 5,000-year-old skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic (the misspelled ‘r’s): It produces an understanding of the math and science and the arts and humanities that result in an understanding of us humans, our cultures, and our civilization and results in a respect for all of us humans and for the civilization that we humans are building. Knowing something about the nature of humans and the flow of our civilization helps us to better choose our combined future. An illiterate population is robbed of the knowledge of the extensive accomplishments of humans and instead might imagine that the community appeared from nowhere and that its future is beyond our own control. After surviving birth and securing enough health to remain alive through infancy, the next most important thing for an individual is to become educated. Increased education is in the interest of our civilization. No other investment would bring a comparable increase in the quality of our lives. Young people should understand that by going to college they will have more of a chance to expand their minds, pursue their talents and passions, and perhaps find a higher paying and more secure job. Its also fun to become friends with persons from around the world who are attending the same school. By the way, if it were up to me I'd have an option to compress seventeen years of school into eleven by taking the current contents of the first four years of college and moving it into high school, which would end at age 16. This is just a 35% compression of the current number of years spent in school.
The Miringoffs explain that in 1996, the suicide rate for young people aged 15-24 is twelve per 100,000. This is 36% higher than it was in 1970, and triple the 1950 rate. For our children under the age of fifteen, the suicide rate in the United States is double the combined total from twenty-five other industrial nations. Suicide–not disease–is the second leading cause of death among young males. William J Bennett explains in The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, that 30% more people die each year from suicide than from homicide; between 1990 and 1996 there were 217,000 suicides but only 161,000 murders. Suicide rates are a reflection of underlying problems in a society. The youth-suicide rate especially tells us something about the state of our society. It shows the portion of our young adults who feel they have such a bleak future that they choose to end their life–at the age we usually feel invincible and indestructible. Those of us who are considering suicide often explain: "I think it is the only way to end the constant daily pain I have felt for months." For more information, you might like to visit the Center For Disease Control’s website at www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/suifacts.htm. Information about the ten leading causes of death by age-group can be found at www.cdc.gov/ncipc/osp/charts.htm.
Rates of child neglect and abuse
Child neglect is defined to be the lack of supervision that allows harm to occur. The harm might be in the form of an injury, malnutrition, or the lack of medical care. Abuse might be physical (21% of cases), sexual (11% of cases), or emotional (68% of cases). In 1996 there were forty-seven reports for every 1,000 children, or about one in ten homes. Parents caused the harm in 80% of the cases, while another family member caused the harm 12% of the time. The remaining 8% of cases are caused by non-family members. About 39% of the abused children were under the age of five and 69% were under the age of ten. Of the one or two thousand children who die each year from abuse (2 children per 100,000), 40% are under the age of one and 80% are under the age of five.
The Miringoffs explain that the number of reported cases of the neglect or abuse of our children has increased 300% between 1970 and 1996. The thirty-year duration of this rise is such a prolonged span of time that the rise is not believed to be due merely to an increase in reporting rates. Physicians, teachers, and caretakers are required by law to report suspected cases. Half the reports are being made by teachers and another 20% by friends and neighbors; about one-third of the reported cases are substantiated. Economic stress, substance abuse, and violence in the home and in the larger society are the principal sources for child abuse. The condition of our lives must be pretty harsh for us to take it out on our children. For more information you might like to visit the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information center within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at http://nccanch.acf.hhs.gov/pubs/factsheets/fatality.cfm.
The Miringoffs explain that despite the decreases of the 1990s, in 1996 our violent crime rate was double its 1970 value of 3.2 per 1,000 persons and four times its 1960 rate of 1.6 per 1,000 persons. For each 1,000 of us in 1996 there were 6.37 violent crimes of robbery, aggravated assault, rape, and murder for an annual total of about 1.5 million cases. By 2003 the total dropped to 1.4 million violent crimes and the rate had fallen to 4.75 violent crimes per 1,000 persons. The continuing decline is good news but the rate is still triple the 1960 value. (See www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm and www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/ucr/cius_03/xl/03tbl01.xls for rates between the years 1984 and 2003.) Bennett shows that households with an annual income of less than $7,500 are twice as likely to be robbed as those earning $75,000.
The total crime rate per 1,000 of us increased from 20 in 1960 to 50 in 1996. (There was a total of thirteen million crimes during 1996 when our population was about 260 million persons.) The "total crime rate" includes the violent crimes mentioned above plus the property crimes of burglary, larceny-theft, motor-vehicle theft, and arson. Larceny and theft account for 58.6% of the crimes, burglary 18.7%, vehicle theft 10.3%, rape 0.7%, while murder is 0.1% of the total. By 2003 the total crime rate had dropped to 40 per 1,000 persons but it is still double the 1960 value. The increase in total crime rates means that something about our lives within our society is producing sufficient burdens on the general population to cause us to resort to crime despite the rosy economic performance of our businesses.
Some see a contribution from U.S. televison news to the 2.5-fold increase between the years 1960 and 1996. Only in the U.S. does televised news list each and every crime, day after day. Lacking photographic images, U.S. radio news broadcasts do not do this; they even omit the dramatic car crashes. (You might like to visit www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/secondary/broadcast_news/news_lesson3.cfm.) Internet news does not give daily lists of crime. The televised news emphasis on crime makes crime seem commonplace. In turn, this may heighten fear and crime. (You might also like to see the Media Awareness Network report at www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/violence/index.cfm.)
At the same time, we can not be surprised when violence breaks out between two persons since many of us are told throughout life that that is the proper response to many situations. We can not say that we do not encourage violence since we give toy knives and guns and such to boys. In would be a shift in our culture to stop giving such toys to boys, but we should. Nations glorify war, and action movies glorify violence in every form. What percentage today’s movies and literature involves violence and how has that percentage differed in previous centuries? It takes no imagination to make an electronic game based on fist fights and shootouts. Let’s challenge our game makers to be more creative and explain to our children that it hurts to be punched or shot. Our society would be far better off if we emphatically discouraged our children from doing even the slightest physical harm to another human being. From the start, we should tell our children not to even hit another human being.
The end result is that in 1996, 6.18 per 1,000 of us (or one in 155 of us) in the United States were in prison, and in 2003, 7.18 per 1,000 (or 1 in 140 of us) were in prison. This is up from the rate of 0.93 per 1,000 in 1970. From 1926 to 1972, this rate remained between 0.75 and 1.00 per 1,000 of us. In 2003, 1 in 37 adults were either in jail or had been in jail sometime during their lifetime. These statistics are compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics within the U.S. Department of Justice. You might like to visit their website at www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pubalp2.htm#pjmidyear.
The U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. For an international comparison, see www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/r188.pdf. This report shows that the incarceration rate per 1,000 persons is 0.3 in India, 0.5 in western Africa and Japan, 0.7 in southern Europe, 1.0 in South America and China, 2.0 in eastern and central Europe, 4.0 in central Asia and South Africa, and 6.18 in the U.S. Of the six billion people in the world, about nine million (0.1% of the total) are in jail. Half the world’s prisoners are jailed in the U.S., Russia, and China.
The Miringoffs point out that the threat of crime weakens the fabric of trust between us and contributes to an atmosphere of fear. The sharp increase in the incarceration rate is a substantial change in American life. We had better stop and reflect upon the direction the nation is headed and on the long-term implications of these recently-high levels of imprisonment. Our young people in the inner-city can develop a feeling of hopelessness when it is seen that one in three 20-year-olds are being jailed, as we saw occurring in the lives of Pharoah and Lafeyette.
U.S. citizens are especially sensitive to the issue of safety and readily react to scary scenarios painted by groups and politicians attempting to sway us to their side in an issue. Safety is measured in terms of crime rates and such but also in terms of more-subjective, inner feelings. For example, the level of our feeling of safety in the neighborhood can be measured by counting the number of times in the last year we did not go out because we were concerned for our family's safety. While walking down the street, as you pass other persons do you clutch your belongings and keep an eye on them as you separate? In other parts of the world, people will casually stroll down an unlit city street at night without even imagining that a passer will attack. By the way, certain primatologists have stated that human interactions are violent about 1% as often as they are in chimpanzee society.
We expend immense energy and resources prosecuting crime. We now spend 100 billion dollars per year in our local, State, and Federal justice systems. This makes $7500 for each of the thirteen million crimes that occur, and means that each of us pays $385 per year for this cost. We spend as much as $30,000 per year to house and feed each prisoner; this is also what it would cost to send each prisoner to one of the higher-priced universities. Excluding community colleges, in 1996 California spent more on criminal corrections than on higher education.
The U.S. reliance on the threat of prison and its harsh life has not been working. (For life in the harshest prisons, see http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/channel/blog/2005/03/explorer_maximum.html.) Crime rates in the U.S. are several times higher than in most other countries. The website www.nationmaster.com shows that one-third of the world’s 70 million crimes per year are committed in the U.S. Prison is not reforming criminals in the U.S. Within three years of their release about 70% of nonviolent offenders are arrested for a new crime, as explained in the report given at www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/pnoesp.txt). In response, some states are beginning to send drug offenders to treatment rather than prison, as is done in many other nations. Reports show that crime is more effectively reduced by money spent in drug treatment than in jailing people who take drugs. Some nations reduce repeat-offender rates by working with inmates after their release. We saw in Chapter 13 that the Dalai Lama suggests cultivating our compassion by imagining ourselves in the place of someone who is suffering in a specific situation. What happens when inmates meditate on the suffering that their crime caused for that other person?
What was our crime rate in the centuries and millenniums of the past? We know that before we began to build our civilization we would occasionally commit murder. We know this from our studies of more-recent gatherer-hunters who have occasionally to deal with such crimes. Ancient crime rates are hard to know with much accuracy due to the lack of hard statistics. We get some clues by determining the portion of homes that have no ground-floor windows and only interior yards. Police forces are only a couple of centuries old so arrest statistics are only that old. We saw in Chapter 15 that police forces began to appear as we switched from being farmers to factory workers.
The economy is a major factor in our crime rates. Since the time at which we all began relying on fluctuating income for weekly survival, crime rates have been seen to go up as the economy goes down. We have seen that we are able to put up with a lot so it takes very bad conditions before things become so hopeless that some of us must resort to a life of drugs and crime. Murders and thefts have been found to increase whenever prices have risen rapidly, as shown by Fischer on page 225. On page 4 he shows prices to have rapidly increased during the 14th, 16th, and 18th centuries, and again in recent decades. Prices remained level during the 15th, 17th, and 19th centuries. He says that increased crime is due to the increased stress caused by suddenly-raised prices.
Throughout history, murder has been committed by foreign invaders who were looking for plunder, a place to migrate, or an increased tax or power base. Within a society, murder is committed during disputes between individuals. It can also be due to the more-general ills of a society. Today, just half of the murderers know their victim. How does our murder rate today compare with that of previous centuries? The 1997 figure of 18,200 murders for 260 million U.S. persons means that about seven out of every 100,000 (or about one in 10,000) of us murdered another person. In Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime, Eisner reports that the murder rate can go up by a factor of ten whenever tempers, a culture of defending “honor,” readily available weapons, and alcohol are frequently mixed, as occurred in the taverns of Early Medieval Europe. The rate can instead go down by a factor of ten when culture encourages a higher level of self-control and the pacification of everyday interactions. Some feel that increased commercial exchange promotes restraint from violence. (Increased commercialization may have nothing to do with decreased inter-personal violence but it seems to be decreasing war between today’s nations; or is it that the lack of war between nations allows them to engage in commerce?) In The Great Wave, David Fischer reports that during the years 1830 through 1860 London's murder conviction rate dropped from fourteen to four per 100,000 residents and then stayed at that level through 1900. For Stockholm, the rate ranged between two and five reported murders per 100,000 residents. These past rates are similar to today's, mostly staying between one and ten murders per 100,000 persons. Do you think this murder rate is a permanent part of our biology? Does our culture significantly affect it in time and place? Murder is the least-common but worst of our crimes.
We want to design our civilization such that crime is decreased to a minimum. How do we put an end to crime, drugs, and poverty? Removing guns will not remove crime. Increasing the size of the police force, even putting a cop in every home and on every street corner, will not end crime. The worst approach is to put one out of every one hundred members of the population into jail, as has been done in the United States–at an annual cost of $30,000 per inmate. These actions do nothing about removing the reasons for crime. (We saw in Chapter 13 that Mencius said you cannot force behavior.) One approach to reduce crime is to demand obedience and another is to remove its causes. We truly fight crime by striving to minimize hopelessness, the unequal access to the benefits of our civilization, and social and economic injustice–because these things are its general cause. A measure of the injustice of our civilization is given by the percentage of us who live in poverty or attempt to escape through drug usage, and also by the percentage of us who are imprisoned or are employed in police and military forces. Which crime fighting approach will produce greater and more permanent decreases in crime? The first approach of demanding obedience is easiest to implement but lacks the human spirit and drive that is part of our nature and is seen to be building our civilization. The cause of crime is a harsh life and a bleak future with insufficient income to get by, making every day a struggle just to get enough money for food and rent. Some sections of the country, and many big cities, have large unemployment rates. One result is that in these sections, as many as half of us men–and many women, too– end up in jail or are killed early in life. Those of us humans who live in these sections know that this hopeless situation is all that we have in store for our entire lifetime. This sometimes results in the adoption of a life of drugs and crime–as we saw occurred in Lafeyette and Pharoah's neighborhood. (If it were up to me, I'd put a free college in the center of each such city.) The daily news also contains corporate crimes involving millions of dollars. These are always crimes of greed, which means that a few high-income persons wanted more money, fast, by taking it from thousands of other persons. (Again, what happens when these demonstrated-to-be-greedy persons meditate on the suffering that their crime caused for those thousands of other persons?) In addition to these sorts of crimes, some of our politicians, generals, and soldiers commit crimes against humanity. We end war crimes by ending war, which is done by saying no when our leaders promote war. Some of us commit crimes against the natural environment in which we live and comprise a part. We end this crime by designing homes, cars, and factories that emit nothing into the environment. This is a small task that our chemists, physicists, and engineers would enjoy. Let’s have a zero-emissions contest. The fact that we humans are still here is proof that we have solved every problem that has come our way–or that we have created–be it social, political, or technological.
Those of us who resort to crime or drug-usage are not "weak people." Together we will look carefully at the unjust causes of crime, drug-usage, hopelessness, and despair and show the strength of our human character in striving to create a more just civilization. How do you rate our progress during the last 10,000 years? As we begin to measure the success of our attempts at governing, we will find the approach that minimizes hopelessness and injustice.
The annual Economic Report of the President shows our average weekly earnings (in 1982 dollars) for each year since 1964 in table B-47. (To see this table go to www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget and search for “hours and earnings” in volume “Economic Report of the President.” You might see the report by going directly to http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/17feb20051700/www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/2005/2005_erp.pdf or to http://frwebgate6.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=293989273899+4+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve. This report shows that our average weekly earnings was over $300 during the years 1964 through 1979, peaking at $331 in 1972. Our earnings fell by about 20% during the years 1973 to 1996 with little mention in the press and little debate by our politicians or presidential candidates. The Miringoffs point out that this 20% drop in wages represented a 20% decrease in the quality of the American Dream. Since 1996, our wages have risen somewhat but are still 16% below their 1972 peak. In 2004, our weekly earnings were $273, which is what they were in the years 1962, 1982, and 1987. Effectively, this means that we did not get a raise between the years 1962 and 2004 and that our wages failed to rise even during the years that our businesses were doing the best. Our businesses experienced an incredible boom during that forty-year period but our wages did not grow at all. This is one-sided. (For international comparisons of wages and such you might like to visit the International Labour Organization at http://laborsta.ilo.org, the Economic Policy Institute at www.epinet.org/books/swa2004/news/swafacts_international.pdf, or the World Bank website at www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2004/index.htm.)
Lower wages make higher business profits, and these profits end up as income mostly for the upper 1% of us. This lessens the strain for the upper 1% of us but increases the strain for the rest of us. Those of us in the lower income brackets would not mind as much that our income had decreased if it had also decreased for everyone else. We trade our labor for wages used to purchase manufactured products. A business utilizes our labor, often combined with purchased raw materials of some sort, to produce a product sold for profit. In 1983, the businesses in the United States had the highest costs of labor in the world, by 1996 its labor cost had fallen to 18th highest. Most of the cause for the decrease in wages is not due to global competition reducing wages in similar jobs located around the world. Instead, we are trading our higher paying jobs in manufacturing for lower paying jobs in the service sector.
This economic strain on the majority of us affects our families and our society in many ways. For example, a decreasing income might result in increased crime. Also, where dad used to earn enough money for the family's needs while mom spent the day raising the children, it is now often the case that both parents must work to make ends meet. This means that our children are spending fewer hours per day with their parents and learning less from them about the ideals of our society. The stress of barely making the bills each month might reduce our patience with our children and lead to increased child abuse. When we are mad at the world, we sometimes take it out on the nearest people. The two-earner family has more income but also a decreased family life along with increased work-stress and the expense of child-care. The lack of money has always been the most common reason for marital stress. When both spouses work, their average annual income is $58,000 while those families with one working-spouse average $33,700.
We have seen that during the nineteenth century an increasing portion of our population switched from working the family farm to depending on wages earned from factory work. As it was found that the wages of too many members of the population were too low, the government was forced to get involved by legally defining a minimum hourly wage. Our government also imposes taxes–which are, in effect, indirect wages–that it collects and redistributes in the attempt to maintain a minimal “living wage.” (Similarly, when our elderly were too often dying in poverty, our government further stepped in to impose indirect-wages through social security taxes.) In the U.S. today, 7.65% of our wages are taken directly from our paychecks for Social Security taxes, and our employer pays a matching tax of 7.65% of our wages for Social Security programs.
Bennett explains that during the years 1960 through 1975, our savings increased from 6% of our after-tax income up to 9%. Since 1975 it has decreased from that high by a factor of eighteen to just 0.5%. The result is that not many of us have money to spare for a sudden expense, such as a car repair. (In fact, many of us can not afford a night out for dinner and a movie more than once per year.) This precarious financial situation makes for a more nervous existence that might be released through increased angry episodes.
How many of us are forced to spend each day doing nothing but trying to earn enough money to buy bread and pay rent? One in ten of those millions of us who are currently caught in that lifelong cycle of a daily struggle for food has talents that are among the top 10% of all persons, yet we are not allowed to contribute these talents to the improvement of our civilization. A measure of our civilization is given by the percentage of us humans who are allowed fully to utilize their talents. Those of us who are constrained to a life of bare subsistence are not allowed to use our talents to contribute to the improvement of our individual lives and to the improvement of our civilization. Our civilization is restrained whenever individuals are restrained. Today's rapid pace of scientific and technological advance is much less than it will be in the future when all persons are allowed fully to contribute their talents. How do you rate our progress during the last 10,000 years?
About one in five of our children live in a home whose income falls below the poverty line. This situation has steadily existed trough the last twenty years (see http://childstats.gov/americaschildren/pdf/ac2004/econ.pdf or http://childstats.gov/americaschildren/eco1.asp the latest figures and trend.) The government website at http://childstats.gov/americaschildren has many indicators of children's well-being describing the economic, health, drug usage, and educational aspects of their lives. We live for our children. Since most of us agree that the needs of our children come first, the information provided on that website give the most meaningful measure of the performance of our families, society, government, and civilization. Our single most meaningful, mutual goal is to improve the lives of our children. The measurements shown by these indicators helps us know if our efforts are succeeding. To determine the portion of our mutual efforts that are directed at our children’s well-being, you might determine the portion of last year’s legislation directly involved them (see Congressional Roll Call, published by Congressional Quarterly, Inc. ).
For a family of four in 2004, the poverty threshold was $19,200, as shown in the reports posted at www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/threshld.html. For a single worker, this corresponds to the total income from a job paying about $10 per hour, which is about double the minimum hourly wage of $5.15. A direct effect of our decreasing wages has been an increase in the number of children living in a family whose income is below the poverty line. Single-parent homes are much more likely to be living in poverty. In those families that have both parents living within the home, about 10% fall below the poverty line while 45% do so in our single-parent homes.
In many parts of the industrialized world, a range of social policies serve to prevent widespread poverty and ensure that very few children live in extreme conditions. The Miringoffs explain that the child poverty rate in France had been about 25% until government programs reduced it to 7%. Not so in the United States. The performance of the United States is among the worst of any industrialized nation. During the 1950s and 1960s, a strong U.S. economy and a range of public policy interventions began to reduce our child-poverty rates to new lows. Through the last few decades, about 20% of our children have grown in poverty. For an international comparison, see www.epinet.org/books/swa2004/news/swafacts_international.pdf.
Beginning a life in poverty can have lifelong effects on the entire life of a child. For example, a lack of nutrition can cause physical and developmental problems. The child-poverty rate is even higher in our major cities. Inadequate, early schooling, as occurs in many low-income areas, can deprive children of future opportunities. Those of us who grow up in poverty face decreased health, minimal education, higher crime, limited employment opportunity, and higher unemployment. In addition, at the age of twelve, we have to make life-and-death decisions about using or selling drugs and joining gangs. All of which was made clear to us by Kotlowitz as he placed us into the lives of Lafeyette and Pharoah.
The Miringoffs point out that we are not addressing the deficit in the economic condition of our children. These continuing conditions point to constrained opportunities and limited prospects for a substantial segment of our young people, and their effects deprive our nation as a whole. Our success in reducing the poverty of our elderly indicates that we do have the capacity to address this type of problem. Despite our booming U.S. economy, poverty among our children is commonplace. The Miringoffs further caution that the fact that one in five of our children is living in poverty, and that we are letting it continue, should be a significant warning sign that the strength and stability of the American future are at risk.
We all know that there is a wide range in incomes people receive from wages and stocks and such. The range varies from those of us earning the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour to those of us who own or operate our largest businesses. Today’s highest paid corporate executives–for example, some of those in the pharmaceutical industry–receive an annual income of one billion dollars. In 2004, the world’s seven hundred billionaires held $2.2 trillion in wealth, which was about one-fifth of the 2004 gross domestic product (GDP) of the U.S and 4% of the world’s $50 trillion dollar gross domestic product. (To see the current U.S. GDP, select a table from www.bea.doc.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/SelectTable.asp or www.bea.doc.gov/beahome.html. For the gross product of the world see www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/xx.html and click on economy.) According to the Merrill Lynch and the Capgemini Group’s World Wealth Report almost eight million persons, which is about 1% of us, hold more than one million dollars in financial assets, for a total of almost $30 trillion dollars. In contrast, we saw that each of the members of a gatherer-hunter society have essentially the same wealth or belongings, which each person makes from readily available raw materials. We also saw the beginnings of wages in the cities of Mesopotamia.
Each time wages have been decreased, we have seen workers complain–for example, the Lowell girls did so during the 1820s. We saw that the Lowell girls were soon replaced by immigrants and that already by the 1840s, many of our newly arriving immigrants were not being paid a living wage. We saw that this problem already existed in the sweat-shops of the 1840s and for the Boston families who lived in the flooded cellars. After prices had increased during the Civil War, workers demanded increases in their wages. We saw that prices fell while wages did not in the years before the labor strikes of the 1880s and 1890s and that many labor strikes erupted over simultaneous, nationwide announcements of sudden wage decreases from several “independent” corporations. The post World War II industrial boom in the United States resulted in steadily increasing wages, especially from 1947 until 1973. This helped to produce a general feeling for the "baby boomer" generation that everything was getting better. But the average income in the U.S. then decreased by 19% during the years 1973 through 1996–this time, with little complaint from workers.
We have seen that, in the U.S., industrialization began just after the year 1800 and that by 1850 its industry was in full bloom. Throughout the 1900s, it was growing through the production of steel, cars, radios, telephones, washing machines, stoves, and televisions. By 1950, it became the case that a few dozen large corporations came to dominate the nation's markets. (The names and products of these largest corporations now shift during each new decade.) The same sequence simultaneously occurred in many nations. Within each of those nations, a handful of companies came to dominate the market. International mergers were rapidly occurring between those corporations by the year 2000.
The industrialization of our civilization has been building for two centuries. It has taken that long to include one-third to one-half the world's population. This is causing a global migration of all of us former farmers into a collection of hugely-populated cities in search of a factory job. In the past, wages were important for just a small portion of us but are now globally important. We have seen that wages in many of the world's nations are so low that they do not give the worker enough wages to buy the items they are manufacturing for the global corporation. Wages determine our minimal ability to buy food, a decent home, medicine, education, clothing, a reasonable retirement, and a comfortable standard of living. Insufficient wages depress the quality of our lives. Those of us who own a business say "we'll give workers a job so they can buy products because we earn our own income from the profits of those purchases," and we workers say "we'll give your business a license to make profits from our work as we buy your products." We saw the harsh truth above that low wages means that two out of the six billion of us humans can't buy enough daily food and that four out of six billion of us cannot afford to purchase the products of the global corporations because one of its produced items cost a year's wages.
What have been the highest levels of inequality in the U.S.? As previously mentioned, in The New Politics John Buenker explained that the social legislation occurring in the 1890s was in response to the perception of the growing inequalities of U.S. society. During the 1890s, those of us among the richest 1% of the population owned 51% of real and personal property; the upper 12% owned 86%, while those of us among the poorest 44% owned just 1.2%. The poorest half of our families received just one-fifth of all wages. On pages 61-63, Korten shows that just before the stock market crash of 1929, those of us among the richest 1% of the population had grown to control 59% of the wealth–the richest 0.5% of us had 32.4%. (In published earnings comparisons, the range of incomes is often divided into fifths. For example, the total income of the upper fifth might be compared to that of the lower fifth. The extreme tenths and the upper 1% are also of interest.) Today, the United States has its highest level of income inequality in the last fifty years–higher also, than in any other industrialized nation. This should not be such a secret. This can continue to occur only as long as it is such a secret. This should be discussed in the daily press and in school so that it will cease to be such a secret.
The profits of our factories becomes the income for those of us who own the factories, which mostly involves the 1% of us who are the most wealthy. The upper 1% of us have an average annual income of $600,000 and a combined income that matches that of the lower 40%. The upper 5% of us have an average annual income of $217,000, which is about the average income of a medical doctor. The upper 20% of us have an average annual income of $125,000, while the lower 20% of us have an average annual income of just $11,500. The top 20% of us receive half our nation's total income while the poorest 20% receive just 4% (see www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/f02.html). The upper 20% of us now receive as much money as the combined total of the middle 60% of us. From 1970 to 1996, the income of the richest fifth increased from 7.6 to 11 times the income of the lowest fifth. The income of the middle 60% also declined during that period. For income inequality by population fifths during the years 1967–2001, you might like to visit the website www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/ie3.html. For other aspects of historical income data see www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/histinctb.html. Some comparisons with our past are given in the following paragraphs.
Mills reports that in 1951, both spouses were wage-earners in just 16% of the homes, there were only twenty people who grossed more than a million dollars per year, and only 379 persons made over a half a million dollars per year. There were 1,383 persons who made one-fourth a million dollars and only 11,490 who made more than $100,000 per year. The highest incomes were obtained from property, dividends, sale of stock and businesses, estates, and trusts. The middle-highest incomes were received as the salaries of chief executives. Mills also explains that the wealthiest of us can take advantage of the tax shelters we lobbied to create. For example, a trust fund is a tax-deductible block of money given to a named charity, often a grandchild. The charity receives the principle but the giver continues to receive the interest while they are alive.
Korten reports that in 1960, the average CEO of a major company received forty times as much compensation as did the average worker. By 1992 the average compensation of the top 1,000 U.S. CEOs had grown to 150 times that of the average worker. By 2002, this ratio had grown to 500 in the U.S. while staying well below fifty in other nations. The average annual CEO compensation in the largest corporations was $3.8 million in 1992. The number of U.S. billionaires rose from one in 1978 to 120 in 1994. The number of billionaires in the world was 145 in 1978, 358 in 1994, and 700 in 2004. Each year we see a new record for the highest compensation of a corporate head. In 1993 the leader of the Disney corporation was paid $200 million out of the corporation's $300 million profits, as mentioned above. You might like to search the web for "executive pay watch" or visit the wesbite www.aflcio.org/corporateamerica/paywatch. Their graph at www.aflcio.org/corporateamerica/paywatch/retirementsecurity shows that the average reported income of the wealthiest 1% of us quadrupled between the years 1913 and 2000 while that of the rest of us stayed about the same. This graph was prepared by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California. You can see many of his reports at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez. For other websites see www.wilsongroup.com/trends/fall99.html, who mentions that in 1998, the median annual CEO compensation of 350 surveyed corporations was $1.6 million and that half the corporations require their CEO to own three to twenty times that amount in its stock. Business Week reported that the median CEO compensation, which includes salary plus stocks and bonuses, at the 365 largest companies in 2003 rose 6 percent to $3.7 million. The wealthiest 0.5% of us own one-third of the stock, the wealthiest 10% own 80%.
What is the level of inequality in income and wealth globally? The 400 richest people in the U.S. had a combined net worth of $328 billion in 1993. This was a larger amount than the combined worth of one billion persons in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The average income of the poorest 20% of the world's people is $163 per year. The six richest persons in the world have the same wealth as the poorest 300 million of us. (This means they can shout "I am as rich as the poorest 300 million persons," just before they die, just like the rest of us do.) Korten reports that during the years 1950 to 1989, the level of income inequality doubled in the recently industrializing nations. In 1992, the United Nations Development Programme reported that the average income of the richest 20% of us is 150 times the average income of the poorest 20% of us. Today, the three wealthiest of us has the same amount of wealth as do the 600 million poorest persons. The richest 20% have 80% of the wealth while one in four of us do not have access to clean water. (The United Nations maintains an estimate of the percentage of us who have access to improved drinking water and proper sewage, see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/socind/watsan.htm.You might also read Water and Food Security at www.fao.org/worldfoodsummit/english/fsheets/water.pdf.) For the lowest one-third of us, how does the average cost of living compare to our annual wage? The answer is that two out of six billion of us humans today go hungry due our income being lower than our cost of living. For the percentage of the population living below the poverty line, see http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indic/indic_25_1_1.html. You can see many U.N. reports at the websites http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data and http://hdr.undp.org. For the latest news, visit www.worldwatch.org.
Handelman shows some figures from the 1998 World Bank report for the income distribution of the poorest 40% and the richest 20% of various nations. These two values are 12% and 60% in Mexico, 15% and 64% in Brazil (the world's highest inequality), 15% and 48% in China, and 21% and 41% in Egypt. (The World Bank reports can be found at http://www-wds.worldbank.org/default.jsp.) The Ratio of the income of the richest 10% of population to that of the poorest 10% for every country of the world can be seen at http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indic/indic_136_1_1.html.
Handelman also shows figures from the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report for 1998. This report rates the ability of the governments of the world to put their economic gains into improved living standards through education, sanitation, and health care. A positive value means the nation's government is performing well. The values for several nations are Vietnam +26, Cuba +17, Grenada +17, France +12, South Korea +6, Mexico +5, Brazil +1, China +1, United States -1, Cameroon -13, Egypt -20, Brunei -36, and Oman -49. These figures show that Kuwait and Oman are failing to turn oil-money into a general well-being of the population and that the United States government is performing poorly for most of its citizens. The current United Nations Human Development Index is shown at the website http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indic/indic_8_1_1.html. The complete list of U.N. reports is given at http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data.
What are some of the effects of inequality in wealth and income? Those of us who live in the nations with the smallest income inequality are seen to have the longest life expectancies. Richard Wilkinson of Sussex University has reported that child mortality rates increase when income inequality increases, and Booth and Walker report that those Central American nations having a sudden increase in income inequality have the least-stable political systems. By allowing our income inequality to increase we risk the raising of class barriers and decreased social mobility. Of special concern is the situation of having some of us live in destitution within sight of luxury, as occurs between the centers and suburbs of many of our largest cities; we saw that this situation existed for Lafeyette and Pharoah. Historically, prolonged harsh economic conditions make a nation susceptible to extreme political forms. Such wealth and income inequality may create a loss of social cohesion, decrease civic trust, and deprive a large portion of us from fully sharing in the benefits of our civilization. We have seen that increased business profits end up as the increased income for the most wealthy of us, but they also come at the expense of the rest of us in terms of increased welfare spending, unemployment insurance, prisons, hospitals, and misery. Dr. Harvey Brenner of John Hopkins University has statistically correlated a 1% decrease in employment with 600 deaths, 150 suicides, 100 homicides, 650 mental hospital admissions, and 550 State prison admissions within the twelve months that follow that increase. The general maintenance of society despite the extra hardship is proof of our strength and endurance. The extra hardship that economic inequality causes is handled with the strength of our character.
Income inequality quickly grows as industrialization begins. Our Industrial Revolution's worldwide shift from self-sufficient farming to factory wage-earning is occurring with incomes that are often too low to provide a living wage. Income inequality means unfair business transactions are occurring and that there is economic injustice. In other words, extreme wealth is nothing but proof of one's ability to gouge others. We have seen that extreme wealth accumulates more-quickly by overcharging and underpaying. The corporation, and even the small-scale entrepreneur, cannot obtain profits from their ideas and products singlehandedly; they still people to purchase their products from the wages they earn from business owners, and they need the labor of other persons who should receive fair wages for enabling the profits to be made. A fair wage is that which is above bare subsistence.
In previous chapters we saw that it is in the biological nature of our species to form mutually beneficial social systems of extended family groups. We are very sensitive to changes in the well-being of our families and of our social system. Each individual is naturally equipped to be very good at detecting violations in our unspoken agreement to exchange assistance in a mutually beneficial manner. This is the reason we get mad about unfair interactions, even those of a simple business transaction. Many of us feel extreme wealth is especially unfair when we barely make enough money each day to buy food and pay rent. We get mad when those of us who feel that money is the meaning of life try to legislatively arrange the world so that they can become ever richer by squeezing ever more out of the rest of us. I'm sure the world would be a happier place and that there would be less drug usage, suicide, crime, and misery if the expenses of us workers decreased by 25%. Do you believe we could pay 25% less for food, rent, utilities, entertainment, and transportation and such if profit percentages, wealth, and executive compensation were held below specific values? I want only to pay a fair price, not to confiscate the assets of the wealthy. Notice that the total $2.2 trillion wealth of the 700 of us billionaires in the world could be distributed as only $350 to each of the six billion of us in the world. The wealth of the absolute richest of us cannot permanently cure our general condition of being poor; we just want a more equitable distribution by having our business owners take less every month as we purchase food, rent, utilities, entertainment, and transportation and such. The inequality of wealth can be decreased only through a generation of effort. What should be done about this economic injustice? Discuss it with your family, friends and neighbors. Should we forge a global agreement for a minimum wage? Should we hold elections to choose maximum wage and wealth levels and profit percentages to govern our businesses?
Some say that such income inequality provides an incentive to achieve but not all of us feel that "achieving" has anything to do with money. Only those of who are the most caught up in the money portion of civilization have gone so far as to decide that money is the meaning of life. If you think money is the most important thing in life then force yourself to envision a civilization without money–because it could be arranged that way. If we remove the pursuit of money then what would we be pursuing in life? Easy. List the things you would be doing today if you knew you were going to die tomorrow. As we saw above, it's a safe bet that you would not spend your last day trying to obtain more money. Would the contents of your last-day-list change if you knew you were going to die in one year? In ten? In one hundred (which is a lifetime)? Should this number of years matter? If it does then you are not pursuing the things that are most important to you. Why not? List the things keeping you from them. It's likely that many of us are experiencing these same obstacles. Once we have identified the largest obstructions, we can work together to remove them. This improves our civilization. We have the technology today to be able to communicate and compile our lists of priorities and recognized obstructions. No other pursuits compare in importance to the items you have just placed on this list. When it is the case that only this list of pursuits and concerns occupies each day of our lives then we have finished building our civilization.
We have seen that most of our governments in the last 4,000 years have been created, designed, and maintained by and for those who feel that success in life means money and power. That is, our political leaders have been among the wealthiest of us. In the last few centuries we have made great progress in redirecting our government toward the concerns of all individuals. Our governments today are more often debating health care than foreign conquests, but the health and happiness of our children and communities is not yet their main, daily concern. It is a safe bet that the concerns of the final form of human civilization will simply match the life-concerns of humans. These concerns involve our children, family, and communities. Not many of us have any interest in attacking others for plunder or accumulating the wealth of millions of persons because we know that happy and healthy children and communities is all that really matters. Some of us spend our lives concerned only for profit. The other six billion of us are concerned about all aspects of life within our civilization. We all contribute our lives in building our mutual civilization and plan for it to be mutually beneficial for all of us. We will know that we have finished building our civilization when social injustice and economic injustice are eliminated.
An important purpose of government has come to be its role in protecting us from the occasional unscrupulous business person who might try to obtain higher profits by overcharging, polluting, damaging the environment, selling defective or spoiled products, or underpaying us wage earners. We have seen that the social legislation of our enlarging government has created a sort of indirect wage that was a necessary response to the social and economic consequences of our Industrial Revolution. Our businesses have grown faster than our reluctant-to-respond reactions to govern them. Government has grown in its slow response and indirectly limits inequality by collecting and redistributing wealth. Would it be better to keep our money in the first place by limiting profits and setting wage minimums and maximums?
In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech about business and government: “In our nation today, we still have the continuing menace of a comparatively small number of people, who honestly believe in their superior right to influence and direct government. Who are unable to see, or unwilling to admit, that the practices by which they maintain their privileges are harmful to the body politic. The White House door is open to all our citizens who come offering to help eradicate the evils that flow from undue concentration of economic power or unfair business practices. Who offer to do all that is possible by cooperative endeavor and to weigh in corrective and helpful legislation where that is necessary." (See The New Deal, The Thirties Volume 2, 1986, Republic Pictures Home Video. V7447.)
In Chapter 13, we saw Radhakrishnan's explanation of the Hindu belief that government was made to protect us from the overly greedy business person. Talking in 1927, he said that today's moneymaking obsession has erupted into an uncontrolled greed that has never before been seen. The love of wealth is disrupting social life and suppressing the spiritual. Greed is the cause of much of the world's meanness and cruelty. Working people deserve more comfort for their role in providing both the labor and the market for the industrialists. He says that workers should receive the highest wages because the work is its only reward. Thinkers and advisors should be paid the least because these actions are reward enough. Do you suppose that we have been complaining about greed since the time of the first cities?
Putting the indicators to work measuring the success of our efforts to govern
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution define government in the U.S., as mentioned in the introduction above. These two documents say that to govern is to promote the general welfare and the pursuit of happiness, establish justice, affect safety and happiness, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and to secure life, rights, and the blessings of liberty. These success of our government can be measured in terms of hundreds of political, economic, social, medical, psychological, and intellectual-artistic indicators. As our government makes increasing use of such indicators to measure the success of its attempts to govern, we will maximize the well-being and the quality of life for as many of us as possible, and we will minimize the injustice of our civilization.
What portion of our legislators efforts currently deals with social health issues? To find out, check their annually published lists of completed legislation. For example, you might like to check Congressional Roll Call, published by Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Each year about 20,000 legislative proposals are submitted but only about 2,000 become law. (Some submissions are just for public show because it is known even before they are submitted that they will get nowhere.) The concerns of our government are made evident by the categories of completed legislation and should be a matter of public debate. The capabilities of our government are determined by monitoring the resulting effects of the completed legislation.
Our economy is complicated. The relationships between its numerous components are only partially understood. But still, our nations are computing increasingly meaningful economic indicators as a result of having applied seventy-five years of concerted effort to this problem. Through trial-and-error experience we have gained some ability to influence the economy. Many relationships are learned the hard way. For example, during economic depressions we learned that the levels of manufacturing and purchasing are closely related.
If the unemployment level increases then the workforce has less money for purchasing manufactured goods so that soon, manufacturing slows down in response. In turn, this leads to further unemployment and to yet further decreases in manufacturing. In response, the United States Congress created unemployment insurance through the Social Security Act of 1935 (In Britain, unemployment insurance was created in 1911). Through this act, our government makes payments to those of us who have recently lost our jobs so that we have money to spend. It is an attempt to keep the economy moving during periods of recession and increased unemployment by keeping money circulating between our manufacturing industries and our wage-earning purchasers. It is more than humane help for just the recently unemployed persons: it is also aid for maintaining higher manufacturing levels. In this way it is not only unemployment insurance but also manufacturing insurance, business insurance, and insurance for the national economy and the people of the nation. By the way, the same sort of relationship exists among the manufacturing and purchasing levels of trading nations, causing recessions to spread around the world.
Our society is also complicated. The relationships between its numerous components are understood very little. In contrast to the economic indicators, our governments have little experience in determining relationships between various social indicators. For example, does an increase in drug usage among ten-year-olds soon result in increases in mental illness, crime, or suicide rates? Do certain indicators, such as the wage or unemployment level, or the levels of community ties and belonging, predict changes in other indicators? Are there threshold points in an indicator that separates qualitatively different regimes? How much inequality can a society absorb before a visible and measurable impact occurs? Which other indicators will improve when there are improvements in the rates of child abuse, high-school dropout rates, numbers of children living in poverty, or persons having secure and meaningful employment?
The economic and business indicators include numerous stock market averages, national debt figures, the number of business starts and failures, the number of new houses being built, the money supply, exchange rates between countries (we saw that just 10% of each day’s international money exchange involves product transactions while the remaining 90% involves transactions among money speculators), interest rates, unemployment rates, consumer confidence indexes, inventory levels, the index of leading economic indicators, balance of trade, inflation rate, and the Gross National Product. These economic indicators tell us about the current state of money and business. Those of us humans who feel that money is the most important aspect of life also feel that the economic indicators are the most important measures of the success of our civilization. But these business and economic indicators do not involve our daily life, except when we go for long periods without employment.
The social indicators measure something of more direct significance–our well-being and the quality of life of us humans. The Miringoffs quote senator Robert F. Kennedy's description of the missing elements of the Gross National Product's measure of society: “The Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
The Genuine Progress Indicator has been compiled by the organization Redefining Progress, Incorporated to give a more socially meaningful measure than is provided by the Gross National Product. Their report can be found at www.redefiningprogress.org/projects/gpi. The people in this organization point out that the Gross National Product includes everything that is purchased, including the money we spend on repairs, car wrecks, divorce fees, crime, sickness, and disease. When we build prisons or pay police officers, this money is included in the Gross National Product and is considered to be economic progress. If a factory pollutes while it is selling products, the Gross National Product increases. When we spend money to buy bottled water because we worry about the quality of tap water, the Gross National Product goes up. All of these sorts of burdens are considered to be economic progress and produce growth in the Gross National Product. These things are welcomed only by those of us who make money from them. The Genuine Progress Indicator takes the Gross National Product and subtracts the costs of crime, environmental degradation, and the burden of ill health and then adds the values of volunteer work and housework and also adjusts for income distribution.
The Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy compiles its Annual Index from measures of medicine, economics, law, education, sociology, psychology, public health, and demography. It concerns children, women, minorities, the aging, poverty, and hunger. It combines earnings, poverty, and inequality to measure well-being and shows that well-being has decreased by half for those of us who have lived in the United States from 1970 to 1996. This means that increases in the Gross National Product do not mean increases in the quality of life for all of us.
Which is more important to you and to your government, the well-being of business, as measured by things like the Gross National Product and the stock market values, or the well-being of us humans, as measured by things like the Index of Social Health? How are these two "well-beings" interdependent? What is the relation between the well-being of business profits and the well-being of all of us? The answer is that during the period 1970 to 1996 business profits increased while wages decreased. Increasing business profits result in greatly increased wages for some of us but decreased wages for many of us.
National and global surveys of social-health indicators
In the last thirty years most of the nations of Europe–and many in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, too–began to prepare annual surveys of quality-of-life indicators and to hold public discussions of the results. These social reports help to create and maintain public debate about the well-being of the people of the nation. These reports were a response to evident social problems, such as inequality. They provide public information and monitoring, receive much media coverage, and produce a public debate that is unseen in the United States.
The United States does not have such a survey, or any organized or continued periodic debate of the concerns expressed by such a survey. But there are about 150 cities or counties in the United States that are attempting to compile such information. (Some city managers complain that they know exact dollar amounts for everything, they even know the exact number of trees in the city's parks, but they do not know how many citizens can read.) In 1997, Connecticut passed a law mandating an annual index of the social health of the people of the state.
The United States has conducted occasional social studies in the past–for example, in 1913 and 1929. We were especially active socially during the 1960s. In 1967, Senator Walter Mondale presented legislation that called for a Council of Social Advisors to parallel the President's Economic Advisors but this did not happen. A social report was published by the Bureau of the Census in 1973, 1976, and 1980, but further reports were canceled by the Reagan Administration. Such cancellations fuel our feelings that our government is unresponsive to our needs. The data from the Census is sold to Sears, Time, and Wards and other such companies who will thoroughly analyze the data to rate the potential profitability of each neighborhood within the nation. Does our government rate the well-being or the quality of life for each neighborhood?
Several United Nations organizations are creating a collection of social health reports, including UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United Nation's annual Human Development Index, mentioned above, is a measure of human progress. It includes purchasing power, literacy, average years of education, and child mortality (we saw that child mortality tells us much about a region's health and health care system.) These reports find no direct link between income and the Human Development Index and illustrate the disparity between economic and social progress. Social reports have been used by nations to promote national debate, define goals and priorities, formulate policy and then measure the success of its implementation. This procedure can make real improvements in the quality of our life. This process is just beginning and it is an international movement.
The World Values Survey is the result of an international collaboration of sociologists seeking to measure our happiness in terms of attaining what we want out of life. You might like to look around their website at www.worldvaluessurvey.org or http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/index.shtml. The surveyors asks individuals about their basic values and beliefs, including the following questions and topics. How do you rate the importance in life for each of family, friends, leisure time, politics, work, religion, and service to others? How do you rate the level of your happiness and health? The survey asks about the parent-child relationship, trust in other people, maintenance of the environment, job ideals, how time is spent, role of government, membership in various types of organizations, participation in politics, social and economic ideals for society, confidence in government and various other organizations, preference for autocratic or democratic government, ability of democratic government, does the nation look out for you or for big interest groups, helping poor nations, role of the United Nations, human rights, good and evil, meaning of life, participation in religion, religious beliefs, political role of religion, satisfaction in life, control of your own life, goals in life, goals for the nation, and is it ok to divorce, cheat on taxes, accept bribes, have an abortion, be homosexual, engage in prostitution, commit suicide, or end your life when incurably sick. For the entire survey, see http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/ques4.shtml.
Social and economic indicators in the daily news
The daily news reports are full of economic and business indicators but include only sporadic reports of social indicators; and since these often discuss data from previous years, they have less impact. Meanwhile, we have stock market updates by the second. There are daily and weekly media presentations that contain thorough discussions by many experts about the tiniest details of economic indicators and the relations between them. We rarely see such depth of commentary of social topics–for example, of the relation between inequality and a deteriorating civil life. The media discussions present a single social health indicator without mention of any related indicators, as if no relations existed. Reports about drug usage or crime rates are given as if they represent aberrations of society instead of interrelated aspects of it. Certainly, there are close connections between the rates for high school drop outs, drug usage, crime, unemployment, decreasing wages, suicide, hunger, homelessness, and illiteracy. Our media discusses the economic and political aspects of social security reform but not the effects it will have on the level of poverty among our elderly. The Miringoffs state that they would like to see the media evaluate the details of the President's State of the Union address from a social health standpoint.
A downturn in an economic indicator, such as an increasing inflation rate or the threat of a recession, instantly raises the intensity of our news reports. The downturn in important social indicators, which has been occurring for thirty years, has caused little stir in the media. We are constantly surprised by a "new social crisis" that actually took years to develop. Much worse is that this has been given little attention by our politicians. Sociologists have accepted part of the blame for the lack of timely and widespread public knowledge of these measurements of our well-being.
Those of us who work in the news media take the media's political role very seriously. Will we take a similar role in our social health? At the same time, media personnel are trained to broadcast the sorts of programs that attract the most advertising income. (Korten, page 152, reports that the advertising of the one hundred largest corporations in America pays for 75% of commercial television time and 50% of public television time.) Audience size is carefully measured for each type of program, and audience interest is determined for each sort of situation within each type of program. These same detailed studies of content are done for the daily news show. These measurements guide the types of stories presented and the number of minutes of the news-hour spent on each of sports and weather and such.
The development of the public debate over social health would be accelerated if our media would add a social report to the standard news contents of business, leisure, weather, politics, sports, and entertainment. This addition would likely increase the size of the audience because issues about ourselves are of interest to us. Since we live for our children, we can believe that one of the most widely watched news reports would concern the health and well-being of our children. Much of the public would tune-in daily for such an ongoing report.
Importance of social-health indicators
The Miringoffs state several important improvements in our society that would occur from an increased public debate about our well-being as measured by a set of social health indicators. First, our democracy would be strengthened. This debate would make our vague notions of well-being more specific and defined and increase our understanding of the fabric that joins us as a society. Economic measures alone are one-sided and fail to provide a true picture of life, while a full set of indicators help us to see our civilization as a whole, composed of religion, health, urban and rural life, birth and retirement, recreation, arts, family, and social and economic matters. We would then better see that gains by some are losses by others. We would also be inspired to greater participation in government. The aim is not to show that everyone has the same vision, but that we can find a vision that includes enough of what everyone believes that it can be endorsed by a broad consensus. (We saw that such a consensus is required in a democracy.) The more accurate our debate on social health, the more strong will be our democracy.
A downturn in a social health indicator is a warning sign that requires attention. If we are better and more continually informed then we will also be better able to respond to their warnings by urging action from our hired officials and elected politicians; we can then make future electoral decisions based on visible results. Results are made visible by continual measurement of social indicators. This also helps us to judge if our efforts and experimental attempts are making the desired improvements. Monitoring the social health indicators would give us a more concrete view of the social effects of policies and events, including globalization for example. We would see both the social and the economic sides of downsizing, outsourcing, changes in the number of hours worked per week, the rise in the numbers of persons who are employed by holding multiple part-time jobs, bankruptcies, growing use of credit, and the status of the two-earner family and its effects on family life. The preoccupation with economic over social indicators means that our elected politicians are praised or scolded for a 1% change in the economy but not for a 10% change in our social health, and that we hear much of a 0.25% change in the interest rate but not that 20% of our children live in poverty.
A problem is more likely to be addressed by politicians if it is being publicly discussed. It is dangerous for democracy that too many of us today feel that government and politics rarely concern our daily lives. A debate about social health indicators would help guide public policy. It would make us feel that our government officials are once again concerned about us and are responsive to our needs. It would be the beginnings of a politics that is more connected to everyday life. The debate would foster the democratic b