BBO Discussion Forums: Is Elizabeth Warren the Smartest Person in U.S. Politics - BBO Discussion Forums

No, I wasn't. If you were an African-American living in an inner city, going to a school with poor teachers and limited technology, and navigating a neighborhood governed by street gangs, how many opportunities for escape from that life do you think you'd have?

I lived in Atlanta, Georgia from 1979 through 1998. While there, I met and worked with a considerable number of African-Americans who had escaped poverty to become successful, competent professional people.

No, it is not easy, far from it. But surely buckling down in school and college offers much better odds for escaping poverty than does a strategy that relies upon success as a professional athlete or a rap artist.

I don't disagree - education and/or the ability to persevere on something to gain expertise is a strong plus. But it's only a plus, not a solution. It doesn't "work".

Yeah, now that I think about it, I was thinking wrong. If you want to go from the ghetto to becoming a millionaire, you may have to become a rock star or pro athlete. But if you just want to get out of poverty, there are better ways. A decent factory or construction job will do it, and if you can learn a professional trade like plumbing you can do quite well.

But if you're born in the middle class, all you really have to do is not screw up.

After all, if generous aid to the poor perpetuates poverty, the United States — which treats its poor far more harshly than other rich countries, and induces them to work much longer hours — should lead the West in social mobility, in the fraction of those born poor who work their way up the scale. In fact, it’s just the opposite: America has less social mobility than most other advanced countries.

And there’s no puzzle why: it’s hard for young people to get ahead when they suffer from poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and lack of access to good education. The antipoverty programs that we have actually do a lot to help people rise. For example, Americans who received early access to food stamps were healthier and more productive in later life than those who didn’t. But we don’t do enough along these lines. The reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty isn’t that the government helps them too much; it’s that it helps them too little.

I don't disagree - education and/or the ability to persevere on something to gain expertise is a strong plus. But it's only a plus, not a solution. It doesn't "work".

I find this very sad, and also demeaning to the poor, and also simply false on observable facts. It has been a solution for a great many people.

Ah, but what constitutes "not screwing up"? Is it keeping a job, or reaching a baseline education level (graduating high school), or not committing crime? Not that you were doing it, but I think there is a danger here of defining the same set of actions as exceptional for one group, and just not screwing up for another. That's a substantial discrepancy in expectations, and expectations have a big influence on success IMO. People who have goals are much more likely to reach them.

If you graduate with average grades from a middle-class or better high school, you should be able to get into college. Not necessarily a top-notch university, but a decent school. And you'll be able to afford to go there. This will all put you on track for a decent life. "Not screwing up" means not squandering the advantages you were given from this upbringing. Don't go to prison, don't become an alcoholic or drug addict, don't flunk out of school.

But if you grow up poor, you have to work much harder to get to that same level. There are lots of roadblocks in your path that don't exist in middle class communities. Kids in the suburbs aren't tempted to join gangs to ensure that they make it through their teenage years alive. If a middle class person becomes a drug or alcohol abuser it's more likely, IMHO, to be a result of voluntary choices gone wrong; if it happens to a poor person, I think it's because they're so despondent of their life that this is their only solace. It's not an excuse, but it's a mitigating factor; it takes great strength of will to overcome these temptations.

My basic point is that the average person is likely to stay at the same level throughout their life. If you grow up in the middle class, and are not exceptional in either a positive or negative direction, you'll stay there. If you grow up poor, you'll probably stay poor -- you have to be exceptional to get out of it. But there are things that society can do to make it less of a struggle.

For young college graduates, the unemployment rate was 10.4 percent in 2010 and 9.4 percent over the last year, while the underemployment rate was 19.8 percent in 2010 and 19.1 percent over the last year.

The facts concerning education versus jobs have changed enough to make your assumptions questionable. You may want to refresh your understanding with this.

For young high school graduates, the unemployment rate was 32.7 percent in 2010 and 31.1 percent over the last year (April 2011–March 2012), while the underemployment rate was 55.9 percent in 2010 and 54.0 percent over the last year.

For young college graduates, the unemployment rate was 10.4 percent in 2010 and 9.4 percent over the last year, while the underemployment rate was 19.8 percent in 2010 and 19.1 percent over the last year.

Anyway, I would like us to get serious about providing suitable training for the non-college bound. Hopefully in something other than the gambling industry, but any port in a storm.

Australian Apprenticeships encompass all apprenticeships and traineeships. They cover all industry sectors in Australia and are used to achieve both 'entry-level' and career 'upskilling' objectives. There were 470,000 Australian Apprentices in-training as at 31 March 2012, an increase of 2.4% from the previous year.

Apprenticeship training in Austria is organized in a dual education system: company-based training of apprentices is complemented by compulsory attendance of a part-time vocational school for apprentices (Berufsschule).[9] It lasts two to four years – the duration varies among the 250 legally recognized apprenticeship trades.

About 40 percent of all Austrian teenagers enter apprenticeship training upon completion of compulsory education (at age 15). This number has been stable since the 1950s

Apprenticeships are part of Germany's dual education system, and as such form an integral part of many people's working life. Finding employment without having completed an apprenticeship is almost impossible. For some particular technical university professions, such as food technology, a completed apprenticeship is often recommended; for some, such as marine engineering it may even be mandatory.

In 2001, two thirds of young people aged under 22 began an apprenticeship, and 78% of them completed it, meaning that approximately 51% of all young people under 22 have completed an apprenticeship.[citation needed] One in three companies offered apprenticeships in 2003,[citation needed] in 2004 the government signed a pledge with industrial unions that all companies except very small ones must take on apprentices.

In the modern era, the number of apprenticeships have declined greatly in the United States. Free traditional apprenticeship job training has largely been replaced with on-the-job training (pay as you work), vocational classes, or college courses, which requires the student or an organization to pay for tuition

ACROSS Europe, apprenticeship programs train millions of young people for skilled jobs. In the United States, where millions of young people leave high school without much hope of entering skilled, well-paid trades, apprenticeship programs barely exist.

Logically, this ancient form of job training seems due for an American revival, given the rising demand for skilled workers to master the complex computerized machinery and the new technologies that are constantly changing work practices. An effort is afoot to give apprenticeship in America a shot in the arm. For teen-agers who do not go on to college, becoming an apprentice would be a middle ground between high school and full-fledged work.

The Commission on the Skills of the American Work Force, a panel of business and union leaders, is issuing a set of proposals today that asks Congress to create a nationwide government-regulated apprenticeship program, financed partly through a payroll tax. Separately, the Labor Department has created the Office of Work-Based Learning to support pilot apprenticeship projects. And the Secretary of Labor, Elizabeth H. Dole, is recruiting 25 industry, government and labor leaders for an advisory group that will suggest ways to expand apprenticeship training.

'We are actively promoting school-to-work programs, but we are not calling them apprenticeship,'' said James D. Van Erden, administrator of the Office of Work-Based Learning. ''The word carries connotations of the union movement and we don't need this negative baggage.'

Apprenticeship means learning a trade, over three or four years, through a combination of classroom study and on-the-job training. Most of the nation's electricians, carpenters, plumbers and ironworkers acquire their skills this way, but outside the construction industry, apprenticeship programs exist only sparsely, for some auto and aircraft workers, machinists, mechanics and a few others.

The Fitzgerald Act, passed by Congress in 1937 to correct abuses inflicted on apprentices, empowered the Labor Department to register the programs and to set standards, like a minimum of 144 hours a year of classroom training. Nevertheless, only 300,000 people are in registered apprenticeship programs, roughly unchanged since 1950. Most programs are the fruit of union agreements, although the military trains 50,000 of the apprentices as an inducement to re-enlist.

From colonial times until well into the Industrial Revolution, being an apprentice was standard job training. With the advent of the assembly line, millions of jobs were limited to two or three simple, quickly learned tasks. As a result, apprenticeship training retreated to crafts like carpentry and electrical work, which still required complex skills. But now, with the rise of a flexible workplace -one that requires ingenuity and complex skills to carry out a variety of tasks - apprenticeship training is coming back into vogue.

Reacting more quickly to the change, West Germany, Sweden, France and other European countries are well ahead of the United States in government-sponsored apprenticeship training, often financed through special taxes. ''You can sustain profits in two ways in the international arena,'' said F. Ray Marshall, a Labor Secretary during the Carter Administration. American companies opted for cost-cutting through layoffs and limits on wage increases, he said, while other industrial nations sustained wages, but trained workers so they could produce more.

Lately, however, some big American companies, like Motorola, Ford, General Electric and American Express, are spending tens of millions of dollars on job training that resembles apprenticeships. They are, in effect, beginning to adopt the European approach. But from a corporate executive's viewpoint, incorporating this individual company training into a national apprenticeship program has two big drawbacks as well as one big advantage.

The advantage is that the companies could pay a training wage with Government sanction. Ironworker apprentices, for example, currently start at between 35 percent and 50 percent of a journeyman's wage, moving up each year toward full pay. One drawbacks is that companies would have to comply with Federal regulations, particularly rules that insist upon minority hiring for the programs. And they would have to issue nationally recognized certificates to newly graduated apprentices, who could then depart with their licenses for new jobs, just as journeymen carpenters move among employers, offering their licenses as proof of their skills.

Whatever the pros and cons, other leading industrial nations are moving to train their workers and increase their productivity. 'We do this for college-educated people,' Mr. Marshall said. 'But we do virtually nothing for people who don't go to college.'

Susanna Capelouto reported this story on NPR this morning: What Germans Know Could Help Bridge U.S. Workers' Skill Gap

"If you tell everybody, 'Get a college education; that gets you into the middle class. Doesn't matter what you major in, you just need that college degree.' Well, is it any surprise?" he says. "Now we see this manufacturing coming back to us, and that's what we have to get ourselves prepared for."

"The Disposable American" is a history in which odd characters like Pat Buchanan, the former chief executives Jack Welch and Albert J. Dunlap (known as Chainsaw Al), the economist Alfred Kahn and others loom large — but so do Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Robert E. Rubin, former secretary of the treasury. But Mr. Uchitelle is just as interested in ordinary people and in the way that layoffs keep tormenting those who have been let go. As he writes, "I did not think in the early stages of the reporting for this book that I would be drawn so persistently into the psychiatric aspect of layoffs."

The layoff, Mr. Uchitelle argues, has transformed the nation. At least 30 million full-time American employees have gotten pink slips since the Labor Department belatedly started to count them in 1984. But add in the early retirees, the "quits" who saw the layoffs coming, and the number is much higher — a whole ghost nation trekking into what for most will be lower-wage work. This is the Dust Bowl in our Golden Bowl, and to Mr. Uchitelle, layoffs in one way are worse than the unemployment of the 1930's. At least then, most of the jobless came back to better-paid, more secure jobs. Those laid off in our time almost never will.

Mr. Uchitelle effectively wrecks the claim that all this downsizing makes the country more productive, more competitive, more flexible. He is willing to admit that downsizing can be necessary. "The global economy is not to be denied," he writes. But to lay off is now like a business school tic, whether it makes any sense or not. With fewer employees, many companies begin to crumble. Innovation also suffers. "Rather than try to outstrip foreign competitors in innovation, a costly and risky process, we gave up in product after product," Mr. Uchitelle writes.

The facts concerning education versus jobs have changed enough to make your assumptions questionable. You may want to refresh your understanding with this.

Yes, I'm aware that the current economy makes things harder for college graduates than it was a decade or two ago. But they can get assistance from their parents while they're looking for work. They have that safety net that poor people don't, so they're better able to ride out the problem. Becoming a drug dealer is not likely to be their instinct to overcome this, but I imagine that for inner-city youths it can be one of the few viable solutions.