Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Middle-Class Black Kids Fall Into Poverty

from CBS News

The Skinny is Keach Hagey's take on the top news of the day and the best of the Internet.

You hear it over and over: So what if America has a widening gap between rich and poor? The important thing is that those poor people don't stay poor for long, and if they do, at least their children are sure to do better.

The Pew Charitable Trust rains some chilling statistics on the parade of upward-mobility believers with three reports on studies testing the viability of the American dream.

The Washington Post picks out the most troubling finding. While two out of three Americans are upwardly mobile, meaning they had higher incomes than their parents, the rosy picture fades fast when looked at through the prism of race.

Forty-five percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle class in 1968 - a stratum with a median income of $55,6000 in inflation-adjusted dollars - grew up to be among the lowest fifth of the nation's earners, with a median family income of $23,000.

Only 16 percent of whites experienced similar downward mobility. At the same time, 48 percent of black children whose parents were in an economic bracket with a median family income of $41,700 sank into the lowest income group.

Researchers were so surprised by the findings they reviewed them repeatedly before concluding they were statistically accurate.

"There's a lot of downward mobility among African Americans," said Ronald Mincy, a Columbia University sociologist who served as an advisor on the Pew project. "

He tries to offer a few guesses - the increase in the number of single-parent black households, continued educational gaps between black and whites - but comes up short in the end. "We don't have an explanation," he said.

The Post offers one possible one: the huge wealth gap separating white and black families of similar incomes. For every $10 of wealth a white person has, studies have found, blacks have $1.

Wal-Mart Improves Employee Health Plan

Public shaming works.

That's the moral of the New York Times' tidings that Wal-Mart is overhauling its notoriously stingy employee health plan.

After years of being a lighting rod for criticism (and, in some states, finger-wagging legislation) for offering skimpy plans to an even skimpier percentage of its employees, the behemoth has simply grown tired of playing the uber-villan.

"All the criticism was hurting its reputation and its ability to expand," report Michael Barbaro and Reed Abelson.

According to data available for the first time, the company is providing insurance to 100,000 more workers than it did three years ago. It also now makes it easier for employees to sign up for insurance than its main competitors. As a result, Barbaro and Abelson report, "many of its most ardent critics have put down their pitchforks."

The Times gently reminds the reader that it was The Times's very own Michael Barbaro and Steven Greenhouse that gave these critics some of their most powerful ammunition in October 2005, when they disclosed a company memo proposing ways to reduce health care spending by hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people form working at Wal-Mart. (The media pounced on the galling suggestion to require all cashiers to do cart gathering as a way of making sure only the fit apply.)

The leak made a difference. The memo's author, M. Susan Chambers, was replaced by a high-profile colleague, Linda Dillman, who was given a mandate to make a difference in health care.

She began surveying workers, researching health plans at the nation's most progressive employers and contacting top health policy experts. Eventually, some experts persuaded Wal-Mart to look at health care as an investment in the work force rather than a cost.

But before anyone should call Wal-Mart anything like a leader in the health care field, the reporters remind us: it still insures less than half of its 1.4 million workers.

Selling Your Kidney For Fun And Profit

Should people be allowed to sell their organs? Some doctors, faced with a severe kidney-donor shortage, are saying yes, the Wall Street Journal reports.

One of them is Dr. Arthur Matas, who's been traveling the country trying to make the case that barring kidney sales is tantamount to sentencing some patients to death. He supports a regulated market for kidneys, which people can give up without excessive health risks. He's also not ruling out paying the families of deceased donors.

Selling kidneys has been banned by federal law ever since a doctor proposed buying kidneys - mostly from homeless people - and selling them to whoever could afford to buy in 1983. (Ideas like this made a weird kind of sense in the Ayn Rand-reading '80s.)

The doctor's proposal was met with widespread outrage, headed up by none other than that future Nobel laureate himself, then-Rep. Al Gore of Tennessee. He proposed a ban, and it was passed in 1984.

Since then, the gap between supply and demand has widened. In 1988, the first year for which data is available, there were fewer than 14,000 patients waiting for a kidney transplant and about 7,000 deceased-donor kidneys. Today, the waiting list has grown five-fold - with the help of rising diabetes rates - but the number of deceased-donor kidneys has only inched up. Last year, about 4,400 people died on waiting lists.

So the idea of a regulated kidney market is being hotly debated in medial forums across the country. Black market kidney sales are common in some developing countries, including Pakistan and the Philippines, but the only country with a government-sanctioned market is our good buddy Iran.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Only 16 percent of whites experienced similar downward mobility. At the same time, 48 percent of black children whose parents were in an economic bracket with a median family income of $41,700 sank into the lowest income group.Thank your for this journal report.