Meritocrazia. Un falso mito made in USA?

[Quasar]

Secondo questo interessante articolo del New York Times, negli USA sarebbero in aumento clientelismi e baronìe.
Ovviamente ciò che se ne deduce è che, venendo meno la competitività (che tanto piace al Condor ) il "sistema america" è in declino.

Sarei curioso di sentire opinioni in merito, soprattutto da parte dei vari forumisti che sono o sono stati negli States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/op...odaysheadlines

The Sons Also Rise
By PAUL KRUGMAN

America, we all know, is the land of opportunity. Your success in life depends on your ability and drive, not on who your father was.

Just ask the Bush brothers. Talk to Elizabeth Cheney, who holds a specially created State Department job, or her husband, chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. Interview Eugene Scalia, the top lawyer at the Labor Department, and Janet Rehnquist, inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services. And don't forget to check in with William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, and the conservative commentator John Podhoretz.

What's interesting is how little comment, let alone criticism, this roll call has occasioned. It might be just another case of kid-gloves treatment by the media, but I think it's a symptom of a broader phenomenon: inherited status is making a comeback.

It has always been good to have a rich or powerful father. Last week my Princeton colleague Alan Krueger wrote a column for The Times surveying statistical studies that debunk the mythology of American social mobility. "If the United States stands out in comparison with other countries," he wrote, "it is in having a more static distribution of income across generations with fewer opportunities for advancement." And Kevin Phillips, in his book "Wealth and Democracy," shows that robber-baron fortunes have been far more persistent than legend would have it.

But the past is only prologue. According to one study cited by Mr. Krueger, the heritability of status has been increasing in recent decades. And that's just the beginning. Underlying economic, social and political trends will give the children of today's wealthy a huge advantage over those who chose the wrong parents.

For one thing, there's more privilege to pass on. Thirty years ago the C.E.O. of a major company was a bureaucrat — well paid, but not truly wealthy. He couldn't give either his position or a large fortune to his heirs. Today's imperial C.E.O.'s, by contrast, will leave vast estates behind — and they are often able to give their children lucrative jobs, too. More broadly, the spectacular increase in American inequality has made the gap between the rich and the middle class wider, and hence more difficult to cross, than it was in the past.

Meanwhile, one key doorway to upward mobility — a good education system, available to all — has been closing. More and more, ambitious parents feel that a public school education is a dead end. It's telling that Jack Grubman, the former Salomon Smith Barney analyst, apparently sold his soul not for personal wealth but for two places in the right nursery school. Alas, most American souls aren't worth enough to get the kids into the 92nd Street Y.

Also, the heritability of status will be mightily reinforced by the repeal of the estate tax — a prime example of the odd way in which public policy and public opinion have shifted in favor of measures that benefit the wealthy, even as our society becomes increasingly class-ridden.

It wasn't always thus. The influential dynasties of the 20th century, like the Kennedys, the Rockefellers and, yes, the Sulzbergers, faced a public suspicious of inherited position; they overcame that suspicion by demonstrating a strong sense of noblesse oblige, justifying their existence by standing for high principles. Indeed, the Kennedy legend has a whiff of Bonnie Prince Charlie about it; the rightful heirs were also perceived as defenders of the downtrodden against the powerful.

But today's heirs feel no need to demonstrate concern for those less fortunate. On the contrary, they are often avid defenders of the powerful against the downtrodden. Mr. Scalia's principal personal claim to fame is his crusade against regulations that protect workers from ergonomic hazards, while Ms. Rehnquist has attracted controversy because of her efforts to weaken the punishment of health-care companies found to have committed fraud.

The official ideology of America's elite remains one of meritocracy, just as our political leadership pretends to be populist. But that won't last. Soon enough, our society will rediscover the importance of good breeding, and the vulgarity of talented upstarts.

For years, opinion leaders have told us that it's all about family values. And it is — but it will take a while before most people realize that they meant the value of coming from the right family.

[Banditore (POL)]

Mah, come direbbe Sgarbi: "Culat*oni e Raccomandati!"

(con l'accezione culat*one=molto fortunato... "ovviamente")

[bom-bim-bom]

Proprio l'altro giorno ho postato questo su di un'altro thread, aggiungiamo legna al fuoco.

la famosa meritocrazia americana dove sta finendo?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...6/c3808034.htm


NOVEMBER 18, 2002

Economic Trends
By Peter Coy

Less Chance to Rise in Life

While the U.S. prides itself on being the land of opportunity, economists have grown less optimistic about the ability of American children to leap ahead of their parents' station in life. A six-figure income remains beyond the grasp of all but 14% of American households (chart). And recent research has found a higher-than-expected correlation between people's position on the income ladder and the rung their parents once occupied.

In the 1980s, studies concluded that, on average, only about 20% of the earnings gap between any two people would persist a generation later as an earnings gap between their children. That would have indicated a society with lots of mobility. However, estimates were later raised to around 40%. Now, research by Bhash Mazumder, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, concludes that fully 60% of the income gap in one generation persists into the next generation, on average. That would mean that children of poor families would tend to be poor as well.

Mazumder and others reach their more pessimistic conclusions by studying longer stretches of earnings history than in previous studies, thus filtering out chance fluctuations in income that temporarily gave children much higher or lower incomes than their parents. The lower level of mobility suggests that the rise in income inequality over the past two decades "may persist for several generations," says Mazumder.

What's the solution? Mazumder suggests that more access to educational loans might help.

He says many poor people who have children with great potential can't raise enough money to send them to good schools, so the children never take home the incomes they're capable of earning.