The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [119]
8. Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society,” in M. H. Apley, ed., Adaptation Level Theory: A Symposium (New York: Academic Press, 1971), pp. 287–302.
9. Data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Situation Summary” and “Overview of BLS Statistics on Employment.”
As is well known, these unemployment rate figures mask an even larger crisis of underemployment. Millions more workers have dropped out of the labor force altogether because they were unable to find jobs and are therefore no longer counted in the headline unemployment rate (which includes only those actively seeking work). Millions more are on forced part-time work. Adding these two groups to the official unemployment rate suggests a true underemployment rate closer to 20 percent of the adult population. In addition, more than 2 million mostly young men are incarcerated in prisons, out of the labor force the hard way.
10. Ibid.
11. For current data, see: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Situation Summary.” For historical data, see U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the US: 2009.
12. The 2011 estimate comes from Congressional Budget Office, “An Analysis of the President’s Budgetary Proposals for Fiscal Year 2012,” Table 1.5.
13. Alicia M. Munnell, Anthony Webb, and Francesca Golub-Soss, “The National Retirement Risk Index: After the Crash,” Center for Retirement Research, October 2009, No. 9-22, p. 1.
14. Most private-sector pension plans are defined-contribution plans, meaning that the payout upon retirement depends on the cumulative return to the pension investments made on behalf of the individual during the working years. Many public employees at the state and local level, by contrast, have defined-benefit plans, meaning that the government employer must set aside enough funds to ensure the promised payout. If the returns on the pension investments falter, as they did in 2008 and after, more payments have to be made into the pension fund to ensure the adequacy of the investment pool to meet the promised retirement benefits. State and local governments are lagging significantly far behind the required contributions as of 2011.
15. See International Monetary Fund, “World Economic Outlook Database: October 2010,” for China’s national savings rate.
16. American Society of Civil Engineers, “2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” March 2009.
17. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Programme for International Student Assessment, “PISA 2009 Results.”
High school performance is seriously lagging in many other ways as well. During the 1950s and 1960s, the high school graduation rate rose in the United States, but then it began to stagnate and even decline in the 1980s and 1990s. While there has been a slight increase in the past decade, the 2009 graduation rate (defined as the number of high school graduates divided by the number of incoming high school freshmen four years earlier) was still lower than in 1970! The U.S. Department of Education estimates a 78 percent graduation rate in 1970, falling to 74 percent in 1984, 73 percent in 1994, and 72 percent in 2001, before rising to 75 percent in 2008. The gaps between nonwhite Hispanics, at 81 percent, and minority groups (Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans), in the low 60s, are large and at best narrowing only slightly. Recent studies show that fewer than half of all high school graduates are “college ready,” meaning that they have the literacy and numeracy to perform at the college level. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, June 2010, “The Condition of Education 2010,” p. 214.
18. John Michael Lee and Anita Rawls, “The College