WRITE a one-sentence summary of each paragraph!

The Undeserving Rich

By Paul Krugman
Published in the New York Times, Jan. 19, 2014

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s, real wages for the bottom half of the workforce have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society shouldn't be up for argument.

But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair's famous dictum: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But it also, I think, reflects distaste for the implications of the numbers, which seem almost like an open invitation to class warfare or, if you prefer, a demonstration that class warfare is already underway, with the plutocrats on offense.

The result has been a determined campaign of statistical obfuscation. At its cruder end, this campaign comes close to outright falsification; at its more sophisticated end, it involves using fancy footwork to propagate what I think of as the myth of the deserving rich.

For an example of de facto falsification, one need look no further than a
recent column by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, which first accused President Obama (wrongly) of making a factual error, then proceeded to assert that rising inequality was no big deal because everyone has been making big gains. Why, incomes for the bottom fifth of the U.S. population have risen 186 percent since 1979!

If this sounds wrong to you, it should: that's a nominal number, not corrected for inflation. You can find the inflation-corrected number in the same Census Bureau table; it shows incomes for the bottom fifth actually falling. Oh, and for the record, at the time of writing this elementary error had not been corrected on The Journal's website.

O.K., that's what crude obfuscation looks like. What about the fancier version?

I've noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.

The story goes like this: America's affluent are affluent because they made the right lifestyle choices. They got themselves good educations, they got and stayed married, and so on. Basically, affluence is a reward for adhering to the Victorian virtues.

What's wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it postulates opportunities that don't exist. For example, how are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities? Even social indicators like family stability are, to an important extent, economic phenomena: nothing takes a toll on family values like lack of employment opportunities.

But the main thing about this myth is that it misidentifies the winners from growing inequality. White-collar professionals, even if married to each other, are only doing O.K. The big winners are a much smaller group. The Occupy movement popularized the concept of the 1 percent, which is a good shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the top 0.1 percent.

And who are these lucky few? Mainly they're executives of some kind, especially, although not only, in finance. You can argue about whether these people deserve to be paid so well, but one thing is clear: They didn't get where they are simply by being prudent, clean, and sober.

So how can the myth of the deserving rich be sustained? Mainly through a strategy of distortion by dilution. You rarely see apologists for inequality willing to talk about the 1 percent, let alone the really big winners. Instead, they talk about the top 20 percent, or at best the top 5 percent. These may sound like innocent choices, but they're not, because they involve lumping in married lawyers with the wolves of Wall Street. The DiCaprio movie of that name, by the way, is wildly popular with finance types, who cheer on the title character another clue to the realities of our new Gilded Age.

Again, I know that these realities make some people, not all of them hired guns for the plutocracy, uncomfortable, and they'd prefer to paint a different picture. But even if the facts have a well-known populist bias, they're still the facts and they must be faced.

cerisechimpanzee766

WRITE a one-sentence summary of each essay and illustrate their relationship

The Undeserving Rich

By Paul Krugman
Published in the New York Times, Jan. 19, 2014

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s, real wages for the bottom half of the workforce have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society shouldn't be up for argument.

But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair's famous dictum: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But it also, I think, reflects distaste for the implications of the numbers, which seem almost like an open invitation to class warfare or, if you prefer, a demonstration that class warfare is already underway, with the plutocrats on offense.

The result has been a determined campaign of statistical obfuscation. At its cruder end, this campaign comes close to outright falsification; at its more sophisticated end, it involves using fancy footwork to propagate what I think of as the myth of the deserving rich.

For an example of de facto falsification, one need look no further than a
recent column by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, which first accused President Obama (wrongly) of making a factual error, then proceeded to assert that rising inequality was no big deal because everyone has been making big gains. Why, incomes for the bottom fifth of the U.S. population have risen 186 percent since 1979!

If this sounds wrong to you, it should: thatâs a nominal number, not corrected for inflation. You can find the inflation-corrected number in the same Census Bureau table; it shows incomes for the bottom fifth actually falling. Oh, and for the record, at the time of writing this elementary error had not been corrected on The Journalâs website.

O.K., thatâs what crude obfuscation looks like. What about the fancier version?

Iâve noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.

The story goes like this: America's affluent are affluent because they made the right lifestyle choices. They got themselves good educations, they got and stayed married, and so on. Basically, affluence is a reward for adhering to the Victorian virtues.

Whatâs wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it postulates opportunities that donât exist. For example, how are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities? Even social indicators like family stability are, to an important extent, economic phenomena: nothing takes a toll on family values like lack of employment opportunities.

But the main thing about this myth is that it misidentifies the winners from growing inequality. White-collar professionals, even if married to each other, are only doing O.K. The big winners are a much smaller group. The Occupy movement popularized the concept of the 1 percent, which is a good shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the top 0.1 percent.

And who are these lucky few? Mainly they're executives of some kind, especially, although not only, in finance. You can argue about whether these people deserve to be paid so well, but one thing is clear: They didn't get where they are simply by being prudent, clean, and sober.

So how can the myth of the deserving rich be sustained? Mainly through a strategy of distortion by dilution. You rarely see apologists for inequality willing to talk about the 1 percent, let alone the really big winners. Instead, they talk about the top 20 percent, or at best the top 5 percent. These may sound like innocent choices, but they're not, because they involve lumping in married lawyers with the wolves of Wall Street. The DiCaprio movie of that name, by the way, is wildly popular with finance types, who cheer on the title character another clue to the realities of our new Gilded Age.

Again, I know that these realities make some people, not all of them hired guns for the plutocracy, uncomfortable, and they'd prefer to paint a different picture. But even if the facts have a well-known populist bias, they're still the facts and they must be faced.

The False Income-Inequality Narrative

BY JASON L. RILEY

Published in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 29, 2015

An enduring theme of the Democratic presidential race has been income inequality, coupled with an enduring belief that Americaâs affluent reached their status at the expense of the poor and the middle class.

Bernie Sanders speaks of little else on the stump. And when not busy dissembling on her handling of email correspondence at the State Department, Hillary Clinton will tell you that the âdeck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.â If Joe Biden gets in, expect more of the same. The vice president is said to be contemplating a 2016 bid in large part because struggling middle-income families may have trouble relating to Mrs. Clinton on inequality given her high living since leaving the White House.

This theme, in any case, seems to resonate with voters, which is no huge shock in the sixth year of an economic recovery. Envy and resentment fuel class warfare and lackluster economic growth throughout the Obama presidency have made people less optimistic and more inclined to fault others for their circumstances. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this week reports that four-in-five Americans âwere either angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power or anxious and uncertain. After all, the economy still feels rocky and unpredictable or both.

Liberals want to address income disparities through wealth redistributionby taking money from more productive people and giving it to the less productive in the name of fairness as the left defines it. They want to raise income taxes, expand the welfare state, lift minimum wages, and strengthen the bargaining power of unions. Mr. Sanders has been the most explicit about this, even going so far as to propose a wealth tax. Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1%, the senator said in July.

In reality, the left has overstated the problem. And all the focus on divvying up existing wealth instead of creating more risks making matters far worse for the people they are trying to help and the country in general. to the extent that the expanding welfare state allows more people to live without working and therefore without earning income or developing their own human capital supporters of the welfare state are contributing to the very income disparities they so much decry, writes economist Thomas Sowell in his new book, âWealth, Poverty and Politics.â

Mr. Sowell is the author of more than 30 books over the past four decades, many having to do with what drives different social and economic outcomes among different groups in the U.S. and elsewhere. In his latest tome, he draws from this well of research to do what he has done so well for so long: question basic assumptions behind public policy and follow the facts where they lead him.

One common assumption is that proportionate or random outcomes are the natural order of things and that gaps or disparities are evidence of something wrong. In fact, huge disparities are the norm, not the exception, because the demographic, cultural, and political factors that influence the development of the human capital that makes people productive also tend to be unequal.

In 2013, only 9% of U.S. women with college degrees who gave birth were unmarried, versus 61% of women who were high-school dropouts and unmarried. Harvard's Robert Putnam reports that children from professional families will hear 19 million more words than their working-class peers before the first day of kindergarten.

These children don't have the same prospects. Equal opportunity, in the sense of being judged and rewarded by the same standards as others, cannot possibly mean equal life chances for children born and raised in these very different settings, writes Mr. Sowell. The fact that life is unfair is not the same as saying that a particular institution, or a particular society, is unfair.

The argument that social mobility is a thing of the past in the U.S. also is disputable. Longitudinal studies by the IRS and others that measure the progress of individuals over time show that the American dream is alive and well. One such paper, published by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2012, measured âwhether a person has more or less income, earnings, or wealth than his or her parents did at the same age and concluded that âthe vast majority of Americans had higher incomes, while 50% had greater wealth.

In other studies, Pew has found generational stagnation but the authors have noted that it didn't apply to immigrants. If low-income immigrants can rise even when the native-born don't, writes Mr. Sowell, that strongly suggests that American society continues to offer opportunities to move up economically, but that not all groups make the same use of these opportunities.

Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor is the author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (Encounter Books, 2014).

raspberrycrocodile828

Corporate Saint #1

AARON FUERSTEIN

For many years, Mr. Feuerststeinâs family has owned a clothing manufacturing business

in Methuen, Massachusetts. In 1995, the factory building burned down. He immediately

commenced to rebuild the factory and, in the interim, fully paid the workerâs salaries and

benefits, increasing the amount of his debt in order to do so.

Unfortunately not all fairy tales have a happy ending. Although the final script has

yet to be written on Mr. Feuersteinâs business, he did have to file bankruptcy. The

costs in rebuilding the factory and not being aggressive in marketing his products caused

him to get into financial trouble. He stated that he did not attribute his financial

problems to his employees. His company is now out of bankruptcy, but it is owned

by the creditors. Mr. Feuerstein is trying to raise capital in order to buy back the

company and he is optimistic about his chances of succeeding.

Compare Mr. Feuersteinâs attitude to the attitude of executives at Enron, Tyco,

Worldcom, Global Crossing and Adelphia Communications. While in real terms the

minimum wage has declined, the pay of corporate executives increased 571% between

1990 and 2000 (five times the rate at which corporate profits increasedâa fact that

should outrage shareholders). Had the minimum wage increased at a similar rate it would

now be over $25 per hour. Aaron Feuerstein is the antithesis of the CEOs who in the

name of the bottom line throw 40,000 workers out on the streetâand then take an

increase in their already obscene salaries. As of the mid 1990âs, American executives

were paid at a rate that is 140 times that of the average worker.

Corporate Saint #2

OJAI VALLEY INN & SPA

âFROM BELLHOPS TO BUILDERSâ

In May, 2003, a major 16-month renovation forced this luxury resort to shut-down two-

thirds of its rooms. This would have resulted in layoffs for half of its 600 employees.

Instead, the management decided to retrain willing workers as carpenters, painters,

electricians, tile setters and drywall installers, saving about 150 jobs. The training

program was performed mainly in-house, and all the trainees were state certified in safety

procedures. The hotel spent about $1-million in the retraining.

Some of the employees have been with the hotel 40 years; the average tenure is eight

years, which is unusually high for the hospitality industry. The resort felt that preserving

that experience and loyalty was important. They feel that there are lots of fine hotels

around, but guests come to them because of the employees. âEmployees are the most

important part of a hotel, because this really is a people businessâ.

Every employee was given a chance to take part. No one who wanted to learn the new

skills was turned away. âThis helps build on that mutual benefit contractâ¦ and

was a solution to keep their best workers on the payroll without being a total financial

drain on the hotelâ said Alec Levenson, labor economist and a professor at USCâs Center

for Effective Organizations. Ojai is a small community with a population of 8,000 and the

hotel is the biggest employer and it would be hard for them to find other employment

locally.

The retrained workers are being used only for renovation work, such as plastering,

painting and tearing out old sinks. A contractor with his own crew is handling the new

construction. However, that doesnât mean that the retrained workers feel like a lower

class of laborers. The esprit de corps is so high that they have designed T-shirts

proclaiming âBuilding a Better Shang-ri La.â

The Los Angeles Time, December 22, 2003

Corporate Saint #3

TIMBERLAND

Jonathan Swartz, C.E.O. of Timberland, believes that in order to equip people to make a

difference in the world, we must insist that doing well and doing good are one and the

same. He serves on President Bushâs taskforce on national service and has instituted a

program called the Path of Service at his company. Timberland employees are given 40

hours of paid leave each year to perform community serviceâpaint a house, tutor a

student, comfort the elderly. Since Mr. Swartzâs family controls the majority of his

companyâs stock (he represents its third generation to head the firm), it is easier for him

to be innovative than it may be for C.E.O.s that have to answer to boards of directors.

The Path of Service program came about because of Mr. Swartzâs personal experience.

In 1989 he provided 50 pairs of boots to a group called City Year, an urban Peace

Corps type of organization, located in Boston. The group invited him to a day of

community service and he was hooked. In addition, Mr. Swartz is also committed to the

concept of tithing and estimates that 10% of his income goes to charity.

Today, Timberland estimated that 5,200 employees have invested more than 170,000

hours in community service in 13 countries. In addition, the company works with

business partners and vendors to arrange regional service events.

Fortune Magazine consistently rates Timberland as one of the best companies in the

country to work for.

Corporate Saint #4

GREYSTON BAKERY

Greyston Bakery is a minority-owned bakery in Yonkers, New York, that has become a

leader in community development and a role model for other socially conscious

businesses.

The bakery actively recruits and hires employees who have had difficulties finding in the

employment in the past. Ex-convicts and drug addicts make up a substantial part of the

employee census.

The bakery is expanding but has committed to remain within southwest Yonkers, the

community where it was created and has grown, and where there is a high concentration

of hard-to-employ individuals.

The profits of the bakery support the Greyston Foundation which includes housing, child

care, health care, a computer learning center, and more.

The bakery empowers its employees by compensating them fairly for their efforts. While

for some employees this salary may not constitute the âliving wageâ, the bakery

encourages and supports employees who seek outside vocational training, academic

advancement, and professional non-bakery-related enrichment.

Corporate Saint #5

BEN & JERRYâS ICE CREAM

We all know about the fantastic ice cream products sold by Ben & Jerryâs. However,

there is another part of their success story. The two native New Yorkerâs, who moved up

to Vermont and started the company, had another mission besides the goals of making the

best ice cream and also creating a profitable company.

Their mission, which they continuously worked towards achieving, included operating

the company in a manner that actively recognizes the central role that business plays in

society by initiating innovative methods to improve the quality of life both nationally and

internationally. They realized that the gap between the rich and the poor is wider than at

anytime since the 1920âs. Another part of their mission was to provide economic

opportunities for those who have been denied them.

As the manufacturing of products creates waste, they worked towards minimizing their

negative effect on the environment. Since the growing of food is overly reliant on the use

of toxic chemicals and other methods that are unsustainable, they support sustainable and

safe methods of food production that reduce environmental degradation, maintain the

productivity of the land over time, and support the economic viability of farms and rural

communities.

Question:What do you think of the idea of Corporate Saints? Is being a Corporate Saint realistic? Is the organization that you are/were apart of operating like a Corporate Saint? Please mention any other organizations that you believe are Corporate Saints.

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