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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