As the sociologists Stephen McNamee and Robert Miller Jr. point out in their book, The Meritocracy Myth, Americans widely believe that success is due to individual talent and effort.  The book challenges that widely held American belief in meritocracy - that people get out of the system what they put into it based on individual merit.

http://www.amazon.com/Meritocracy-Myth-Stephen-J-McNamee/dp/0742561682/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Basil Marceaux

In this episode of The Colbert Report, " Basil Marceaux.com & Obama's Birthday ," "Stephen reminds Tennessee viewers to vote for Basil Marceaux.com and refuses to celebrate President Obama's birthday. (02:16)" Not all political candidates are as clueless as Marceaux, but too many of them are, especially on issues of economic policy.
Read more

Road projects' disappointing effect on jobs

Image
In the January 11, 2010 article " AP IMPACT: Road projects don't help unemployment ," Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and Brett J. Blackledge report that recent road construction and maintenance projects have not generated the jobs many expected. WASHINGTON – Ten months into President Barack Obama's first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found. Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn't matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama's argument that more road money would address an "urgent need to accelerate job growth." Obama wants a second stimulus bill from Congress that relies in part on more road and bridge spending, projects the president sa...
Read more

The U.S. economy has treated older generations much better than younger ones.

Image
In the article "Wealth and Generations" in the June/July/August 2015 edition of Washington Monthly , Philip Longman explains that by focusing on the growing riches of the “1 percent,” we miss another form of inequality that is bigger, and arguably even more dangerous. Longmans writes: "These vastly different economic trajectories experienced by today’s living generations are basically unprecedented. Throughout most of our history, inequality between generations was large and usually increasing, to be sure, but for the happy reason that most members of each new generation far surpassed their parents’ material standard of living. Today, inequality between generations is increasing for the opposite reason. Though much more productive and generally better educated, most of today’s workers are falling farther and farther behind their parents’ generation in most measures of economic well-being." http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaugust_2015/features/wealth...
Read more