The gap in test scores between rich and poor children is 30-40% wider than it was 25 years ago: given that the distribution of innate intelligence is unlikely to have shifted so much in one generation, it suggests that rich youngsters are benefitting more than ever from their economic and social advantages. Measures of social mobility between generations, already lower than in much of Europe, have stagnated” (The Economist, 9/23/13).
This is bad for America and sad for the world. You do not have to have an IQ of 150 to recognise how unhealthy this is for any nation. But with political will (sadly absent) it could be fixed. We could start with with a tax regime riddled with boondoggles for the rich and a higher education system so expensive it excludes poorer people. Epicureans don’t believe in equality – they believe in equal opportunity. The answer is better schools and colleges that offer reasonable fees, and better teachers, but a section of the population prefers to leave others ignorant because they object to paying tax. Equal opportunity is vanishing in the United States.
i was talking to a business owner who is a dual citizen of both the US the UK. She had been trying to sign up for Obamacare. After waiting two hours online she was asked what her immigration status was. “I have an America passport and am a citizen”. She was told that that was insufficient and that she had to provide them with a copy of both her drivers licence and her social security number. And no, they couldn’t look up her passport details. Citizenship was insufficient! This illustrates the desperately poor education and training of people who do these types of job. Leaving aside the stupid bureaucracy, he didn’t seem to understand that if you had an American passport you were also an American citizen. You can get a social security number and a drivers licence with a green card but a bona fide American citizen has a passport and should not be quizzed about her immigration status because she has a vaguely Iranian name. This is just one example of lack of general knowledge. What do people learn in school?