A Nation of Spoiled Brats

[ The paper by Saez and Piketty from Berkeley University that came out in early March is particularly instructive. It shows not only that 93 percent of the gains in the 3 percent growth America got that year went to the top 1 percent, but also that the top 0.01 percent, namely the top 15,600 families, took 37 percent of the growth. ]

Great post!

The author is correct. This country is toast. Great post.

Great article. I have to agree with Luce on most all points, especially this bit:

"The question of whether that pragmatic instinct that Tocqueville best described is now missing is more a question about whether the market signals are working in American politics anymore. Because the consumers want some kind of change; they want some kind of recognition of the degree of pain and strain they feel nowadays in their lives, to which they are not accustomed. The system seems unable to respond. Democracy is a market as well, and it doesn't seem to be working.

So the question is what stops democracy from being a market in America? To answer that we go back to the world of money in politics; we go back to the world of Latin Americanization of American society; we go back to some of the institutional factors like gerrymandering. But we also go back again to the American people, to the consumers."

Willful ignorance, market fanaticism, radical individualism, educational atrophy, and insane interpretations of the 1st amendment will likely relegate the U.S. to the dustbin of history's failed experiments. I only hope we do not take the rest of the world down with us in an orgy of militaristic reflex.

Thanks Incredulous, I will need to check this out later.... =)

I am somewhat dismayed to see the author is pretty close to the mark. Great post, voted up.

We're number one at waving foam fingers that say we're number one

.A school of art or of anything else {a nation} is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly.

---Goethe----

When I first saw the headline, I expected to read something about how we are too indulgent with our children, but the interview didn't seem to go that way at all...it seemed to be more about the way we have, and continue to, indulge ourselves in the notion that we are number one. A lot of what they discuss are items that frequently show up in the top 10 here on Current, but Luce seems to place them in a larger, more global context.

"But there is a lot of evidence in studies of other economies that when you have gross, Latin American-style inequality, growth and competitiveness tend to get adversely hit."