The Triple Package (46 page)

“History is more or less bunk”
:
Charles N. Wheeler, “Fight to Disarm His Life’s Work, Henry Ford Vows,”
Chicago Tribune
, May 25, 1916, p. 10.

“disintegration of the work ethic”
:
Robert Rector and Jennifer A. Marshall, “The Unfinished Work of Welfare Reform,”
National Affairs
(Winter 2013).

“There is still today a frontier”
:
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Radio Address on the Third Anniversary of the Social Security Act,” August 15, 1938, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15523.

“Second Bill of Rights”
 . . . “inadequate”:
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16518.

“freedom from insecurity”
:
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Greeting to the Economics Club of New York,” Dec. 2, 1940, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15907; see also David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 247. The term “social security” is believed to have been coined by the economist Abraham Epstein, who in 1933 wrote, “Ever since Adam and Eve . . . insecurity has been the bane of mankind.” Abraham Epstein,
Insecurity: A Challenge to America
(New York: H. Smith & R. Haas, 1933), p. 1.

chances of graduating
:
Greg Toppo, “Big-City Schools Struggle with Graduation Rates,”
USA Today
, June 20, 2006.

$130,000 a year selling drugs
:
Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, “An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances,”
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
(August 2000), pp. 755, 770.

at the average age of twenty
:
See Leon Bing,
Do or Die
(New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 268 (estimating the life expectancy of active gang members in South Central Los Angeles at nineteen years); William J. Harness, Chief of Police,
Gang Facts and Myths: A Guide for School Administrators
(Conroe ISD Police Department, 1994–2006), p. 21 (stating that the average life expectancy of an active gang member is 20 years, 5 months).

everything that’s important about the big picture
:
See, e.g., William Julius Wilson,
When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 52–3 (“Neighborboods that offer few legitimate employment opportunities, inadequate job information networks, and poor schools lead to the disappearance of work . . . many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy . . . . These circumstances also increase the likelihood that the residents will rely on illegitimate sources of income”), p. 107 (Where “young people have little reason to believe that they have a promising future,” there tends to be “an explosion of single-parent families”); see also Thomas J. Sugrue,
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-War Detroit
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Bruce Western,
Punishment and Inequality in America
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Alex Kotlowitz,
There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America
(New York: Anchor, 1991).

apply at McDonald’s
:
See Paul Krugman,
End This Depression Now!
(New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), p. 7; see also Levitt and Venkatesh, “An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang’s Finances,” p. 771 (noting that gang members often also hold low-paying jobs in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants).

wiped out all the sectors
:
See, e.g., Sugrue,
The Origins of the Urban Crisis
, p. 6; Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee,
The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 243, 264–9; Christopher Price, “The Impact of the Mechanization of the Coal Mining Industry on the Population and Economy of Twentieth Century West Virginia,”
West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly
22, no. 3 (2008), pp. 2–3.

rise in American income and standards of living
:
Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout,
Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), pp. 139–40 (stating that “Americans easily quadrupled their real earnings” over the course of the twentieth century); U.S. Congress, “The U.S. Economy at the Beginning and End of the 20th Century,” usinfo.org/enus/economy/overview/docs/century.pdf (“Today, the average full-time employee works about 40 hours per week rather than 60, and the average family spends just 15 percent of its income on food today, compared to 44 percent in 1900”); Raghuram G. Rajan,
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 31 (emphasizing U.S. policies that widened availability of credit to ordinary Americans starting in the early 1980s).

greatest wealth explosions
:
See, e.g., Niall Ferguson,
Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire
(New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 18–9; John Steele Gordon,
An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2004), pp. 416–8; Michael Lewis,
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), p. 30 (quoting venture capitalist John Doerr as describing Silicon Valley in the 1990s as “the greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet”).

entire decade came to be symbolized
:
Tom Wolfe,
Bonfire of the Vanities
(New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1987); see Jessica Winter, “Greed Is Bad. Bad!” Slate.com, Sept. 25, 2007, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/dvdextras/2007/09/greed_is_bad_bad.html.

1990s were astronomically even richer
:
For graphs dramatically illustrating the record highs in stock prices, corporate earnings, and home prices, see Robert J. Shiller,
Irrational Exuberance
(2d ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 3–6, 13; see also Bill Hutchinson, “He Brakes for Cash: Day-Trader Cabbie Winning Wall St. Game,”
New York Daily News
, Aug. 19, 1999, p. 3.

multimillionaires overnight
:
Eryn Brown, “Valley of the Dollars: The Young, Wealthy Netheads of San Francisco and Silicon Valley Protest That It’s Not About the Money. Give Us a Break,” CNN.com, Sept. 27, 1999, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/09/27/266205; Ilana DeBare, “Young, Rich, Now What?: Tech Millionaires Face the Rest of Their Lives,”
S.F. Chronicle
, June 4, 1999, http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Young-Rich-Now-What-Tech-millionaires-face-2927263.php; Eryn Brown, “So Rich, So Young, but Are They Really Happy?,” CNNMoney.com, Sept. 18, 2000, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/09/18/287692.

stock market tripled
:
Shiller,
Irrational Exuberance
, p. 13.

sixty-four new millionaires per day
:
Rusty Dornin, “New Anxieties Can Accompany Silicon Valley’s New Money,” CNN.com, Feb. 26, 2000, http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/02/26/sudden.wealth.syndrome.

Corporate compensation soared
:
Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm,
Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), pp. 68–9; Krugman,
End This Depression Now!
, p. 78.

few complained
:
Shiller,
Irrational Exuberance
, p. 3 (chart showing soaring stock prices in the 1990s), p. 213.

family net worth climbed
:
Felix Salmon, “Chart of the Day: Median Net Worth, 1962–2010,” Reuters, June 12, 2012, http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/06/12/chart-of-the-day-median-net-worth-1962-2010.

the top 1 percent of U.S. earners
:
Congressional Budget Office,
Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007
(Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, 2011), pp. ix–xi.

vast majority of Americans
:
Ibid., p. ix (reporting an approximate 65 percent income gain for Americans in the top quintile from 1979 to 2007 and 40 percent gain for those in the second through fourth quintiles). For other estimates of historical American income growth broken down by quintile, see U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables: Households, Table H-3: Mean Household Income Received by Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent (All Races), www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/income/data/historical/household; but cf. Russell Sage Foundation, “Chartbook of Social Inequality,” www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/chartbook/Income %20and%20 Earnings.pdf.

As economist Robert Shiller observes
:
Shiller,
Irrational Exuberance
, p. 213.

globalization seemed to herald
:
See Amy Chua,
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 233.

law students at Georgetown
:
Brooke Masters, “GU Legal Eagles Flying to Estonia’s Aid,”
Washington Post
, June 18, 1992.

“end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”
 . . . “final form”:
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: Avon Books, 1992), p. xi.

started U.S.-style stock exchanges
:
See Klaus Weber, Gerald F. Davis, and Michael Lounsbury, “Policy as Myth and Ceremony? The Global Spread of Stock Exchanges, 1980–2005,”
Academy of Management Journal
52, no. 6 (2009), pp. 1319, 1320; Kathryn C. Lavelle,
The Politics of Equity Finance in Emerging Markets
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 19–22.

“hyperpower”
:
See Amy Chua,
Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 259–61.

“I cannot think of a single psychological problem”
:
Nathaniel Branden,
The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
(New York: Bantam Books, 1994), p. xv.

a bestseller
:
See Nathaniel Branden,
My Years with Ayn Rand
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999), p. 368 (claiming about a million copies sold worldwide).

“virtually every
social
problem”
:
Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney,
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011), pp. 188–9 (italics added) (quoting the chairman of California’s task force on self-esteem).

“[M]any, if not most”
:
Ibid., p. 189 (quoting sociologist Neil Smelser).

“self-esteem was the most important thing”
:
Carol S. Dweck, “Mindsets: How Praise Is Harming Youth and What Can Be Done About It,”
School Library Media Activities Monthly
24, no. 5 (2008), p. 55.

accomplishment remained central
:
See William James,
The Principles of Psychology
(New York: Henry Holt, 1890), vol. 1, pp. 309–11. James observes that a person has to succeed not in everything, but in what’s important to him, in order to sustain his self-esteem: “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek.”
Id
. at 310.

severed self-esteem from esteem-worthy conduct
:
This severance can be seen in the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the standard measure of self-esteem used by psychologists everywhere today. See, e.g., University of Maryland, Department of Sociology, “Rosenberg-Self-Esteem Scale,” www.socy.umd.edu/quick-links/rosenberg-self-esteem-scale (“The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale is perhaps the most widely-used self-esteem measure in social science research”). Created by Morris Rosenberg in 1965, the scale is a question-and-answer survey instrument, entirely attitudinal, asking individuals in a variety of ways how good they feel about themselves. With the arguable exception of asking respondents how strongly they agree with the statement, “I am able to do things as well as most other people,” the Rosenberg test asks no questions about actual conduct, performance, successes, failures, etc.

feel good about themselves
:
See Lori Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,”
Atlantic Monthly
(July/August 2011) (questioning “self-esteem” that “comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment”).

much more satisfied with themselves
:
Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell,
The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement
(New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 13 (“[s]elf-esteem is at an all-time high in most groups”).

Asian American students
:
Douglas S. Massey et al.,
The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 120–1.

world’s leaders in self-esteem
 . . . among the lower-scoring:
See, e.g., Tom Loveless,
The 2006 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2006), pp. 13–20.