The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (40 page)

22.
Jane G. Gravelle, “Tax Havens: International Tax Avoidance and Evasion,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, July 2009.

23.
Nolan McCarty et al.,
Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 272.

24.
Business Wire, “Business and Financial Leaders Lord Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch Invest in Genie Oil & Gas,” November 15, 2010.

25.
Luca Di Leo and Jeffrey Sparshott, “Corporate Profits Rise to Record Annual Rate,”
Wall Street Journal
, November 24, 2010.

26.
Aaron Lucchetti and Stephen Grocer, “On Street, Pay Vaults to Record Altitude,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 2, 2011.

Chapter 8: The Distracted Society

1.
Coen Advertising Expenditure Dataset, quoted in Douglas Galbi, “U.S. Advertising Expenditure, 1998–2007,” Purple Motes blog, February 16, 2009.

2.
Thorstein Veblen,
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions
(New York: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 68–101.

3.
Edward Bernays,
Propaganda
, 1928:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.… There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities. (pp. 9, 35)

4.
U.S. Census Bureau, “No. HS-42: Selected Communications Media: 1920 to 2001.”

5.
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Food for Thought: Television Food Advertising to Children in the United States,” March 2007, p. 2.

6.
Joe McGinniss,
The Selling of the President 1968
(New York: Trident, 1969).

7.
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Food for Thought,” p. 57.

8.
Deirdre Barrett,
Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

9.
There were three main forms of regulation. First, the FCC insisted on some programming not supported by advertising. Second, the FCC maintained a “Fairness Doctrine” to ensure that alternative points of view would be heard. Third, the FCC imposed ownership limits on the media, to prevent the monopolization of the local airwaves or the joint control of print, radio, and TV in a local market. These three mechanisms tamed the worst excesses of privately owned television as late as the 1970s. Then came the deregulation of the 1980s, which continues today.

10.
Wilhelm Röpke,
A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market
(Wilmington: ISI Books, 1960), p. 137.

11.
Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), p. 53.

12.
John Maynard Keynes,
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
(Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 2011), Chapter 2, Paragraph 20.

13.
Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays.”

14.
Google: “Google Search Advertising Revenue Grows 20.2% in 2010,” January 20, 2011. Facebook: “Facebook’s Ad Revenue Hit $1.86b for 2010,” January 17, 2011.

15.
Emily Steel, “A Web Pioneer Profiles Users by Name,”
Wall Street Journal
, October 25, 2010.

16.
The following data are from Roger Bohn and James Short, “How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers,” Global Information Industry Center, December 2009.

17.
National Endowment for the Arts, “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence,” Research Report No. 47, November 2007, Sections 1 and 2.

18.
Mark Bauerlein,
The Dumbest Generation
(New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 16.

19.
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Knows Basic Facts About Politics, Economics, but Struggles with Specifics,” November 2010.

Part II: The Path to Prosperity

Chapter 9: The Mindful Society

1.
Attributed to Aristotle in Stobaeus,
Florilegium
, transl. J.E.C. Welldon.

2.
For GDP data, see World Bank Data and Statistics,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/
Resources/GNIPC.pdf
. For life expectancy data, see World Health Organization Global Health Observatory Data Repository.

3.
Geoffrey Miller,
Spent
(New York: Penguin, 2009), p. 65.

4.
Elizabeth Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson, “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right,”
Journal of Consumer Psychology
21, no. 2, pp. 115–25.

5.
Ibid., p. 123.

6.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release: Table A-4—Employment Status of the Civilian Population 25 Years and Over by Educational Attainment.”

The education gradient is stark. Among those twenty-five years and older, the unemployment rate in December 2010 was 15.7 percent for those with less than a high school education, 9.8 percent for those whose highest education attainment was a high school diploma, 7.9 percent for those with some post—high school education, but without a degree; and 4.6 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

7.
The fact that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet was first accurately elaborated in 1824 by French scientist Joseph Fourier and in numerical detail by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896.

8.
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media,” July 2009.

9.
Bob Altemeyer, “Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to Be Prejudiced?,”
International Journal for the Psychology of Religion
13, no. 1 (2003): 17. Altemeyer concludes that “strong, early emphasis of the family religion may … produce a template for ‘us-them’ discrimination that facilitates acquiring later prejudices.” Similarly, Hall, Matz, and Wood find that religiosity and racism are correlated. They too surmise that “a strong in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups. Other races might be treated as out-groups because religion is practiced largely within race, because training in a religious in-group identity promotes general ethnocentrism, and because different others appear to be in competition for resources.” (Deborah Hall et al., “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic Review of Religious Racism,”
Personal Social Psychology Review
14, no. 1 [December 2009], p. 126.)

10.
Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,”
Scandinavian Political Studies
30, no. 2 (June 2007).

11.
Senate floor statement by Senator James Inhofe, July 28, 2003.

12.
Hans Jonas,
The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for a Technological Age
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

13.
National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,” November 2008.

14.
Hans Küng, “Manifesto for a Global Economic Ethic,” Tübingen: Global Ethic Foundation, 2009, p. 5.

15.
John F. Kennedy, Address before the Irish Parliament, June 1963,
http://ua_tuathal.tripod.com/kennedy.html
.

16.
John F. Kennedy, Remarks at American University Commencement, June 1963.

Chapter 10: Prosperity Regained

1.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, “The Condition of Education 2010,” June 2010, p. 214.

2.
In the early years, the government should subsidize the purchases of electric vehicles, to help the industry “move down the learning curve.” Later on, electric vehicles will compete on their own vis-à-vis the traditional alternatives, assuming of course that gasoline use is properly taxed to account for its adverse environmental externalities.

3.
U.S. Department of Education, “Mortgaging Our Future: How Financial Barriers to College Undercut America’s Global Competitiveness,” A Report of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, September 2006, p. iii.

4.
See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release: Table A-15—Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization.”

5.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Public Expenditure and Participant Stocks on LMP,” Statistical Database.

6.
U.S. Department of Education, “Mortgaging Our Future: How Financial Barriers to College Undercut America’s Global Competitiveness.”

7.
U.S. Department of Education, “Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary School Districts: School Year 2007–2008 (Fiscal Year 2008),” NCES 2010-323, August 2010, p. 6.

8.
U.S. Department of Education, “The Condition of Education 2010,” p. 277.

9.
McKinsey & Company, “Winning by Degrees: The Strategies of Highly Productive Higher-Education Institutions,” November 2010, p. 8.

10.
America’s Promise Alliance, “Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic,” November 2010, p. 16.

11.
Ibid.

12.
Ibid., p. 50. This study concluded: “Although 17 percent of these [charter] schools provide a superior education to traditional public schools, half of them offer an education that is comparable, and more than a third of them provide an education that is significantly worse than the local public school.”

13.
For more information on James Heckman’s research on early childhood investment, see
http://www.heckmanequation.org/
.

14.
U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 3: Poverty Status of People, by Age, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1958–2009,” Current Population Survey, Annual and Social Economic Supplements.

15.
Gösta Esping-Andersen et al.,
Why We Need a New Welfare State
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); particularly see Chapter 3, “A Child-Centered Social Investment Strategy,” pp. 26–67); and Gösta Esping-Andersen, “Unequal Opportunities and the Mechanisms of Social Inheritance,” in
Generational Income Mobility in North America and Europe
, ed. Miles Corak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

16.
For U.S. data, see U.S. Census Bureau,
Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the US: 2009
, p. 15. For Sweden data, see Gösta Esping-Andersen, “Unequal Opportunities and the Mechanisms of Social Inheritance,” p. 308.

17.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, “OECD Family Database.”

18.
George Halvorson,
Health Care Will Not Reform Itself
(New York: CRC Press, 2009). His point is this: health care providers are making a bundle of money, and have no incentive to give it up:

Many health care providers have set up shop in America. From a pure business perspective, those businesses are almost all economic successes—winners—not economic losers.… Expecting our current massive, very well-financed, high-revenue, high-margin, high-growth, high-cost health care infrastructure to voluntarily take steps to reduce costs and prices, and expecting our care infrastructure to also voluntarily and spontaneously improve either care outcomes or care quality is unfortunately naïve.… Health care in America is a robust and growing nonsystem of immense size, scope, and scale. It is very well fed. (p. 2)

Halvorson explains that the huge costs in America come from treating patients with multiple chronic conditions requiring a large number of doctors: “[O]ver 75 percent of care costs in America currently result from patients with chronic conditions, and 80 percent of those costs come from patients with both chronic care conditions and ‘co-morbities’ ” (p. xix).

When many doctors are involved, there are often major duplications of testing, examinations, billing services, record keeping, administration, and with poor medical coordination as well. There is also far too little help for individuals to avoid or reduce their chronic conditions in the first place, through healthier lifestyles, diet, exercise, or other choices that might be within their means and reach. The reimbursement system creates incentives to maximize costs. Employer-provided health care coverage is heavily subsidized because it is tax-deductible and doctors are reimbursed for the procedures and services they offer, not for the health outcomes that result. As Halvorson grimly notes: “Hospitals in America do not get paid more money if they do great work and are completely infection free. They do get paid a lot more money for patients with infections” (p. 11). He recounts cases where reengineering of services led to lower costs—and a revolt by the doctors, who felt that their incomes and jobs were jeopardized.