Expert answer:A substantial reply could be anywhere between 50 a
Expert answer:Journals for 3 different articles. please analyse each article separately. Journal Requirements:Journals must be a minimum of 500 words minimum, and you must reply to at least 2 peers. There is no word limit on peer replies, but you must show that you have engaged with your peers’ responses and not simply said “I agree” or “Great post!” A substantial reply could be anywhere between 50 and 150 words. You are not required, but you are encouraged to continue replying to one another throughout the week. Let’s have some great conversations! Failure to meet the word limit will result in a reduced journal grade. Ad Hominem attacks will not be tolerated. If you disagree with someone, attack the argument, not the person.For every journal, include a summary and analysis of all the texts that you read for the week. Failure to summarize/analyze will result in half credit (or less) for the journal.The prompt (this is separate from the summary/analysis) is a guideline, and will usually be open-ended (i.e. not a question with a right or wrong answer. Additionally, I want you to explore your own thoughts and feelings and ideas along with the texts and the subject matter in order to improve your critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. Journal Prompt: In addition to your summaries/analysis of the weeks readings, review the following poem and give your interpretation. Does Langston Hughes have a positive or negative view of the American Dream? Where do we see this in the poem? Think about the historical context in which this was written. Does that change the meaning of the poem? Why or why not? What else do you have to say about this poem?THE POEM IS LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN.
letamericabeamericaagain.pdf
the_upside_of_income_inequality.pdf
krugman_confronting_inequality.pdf
harrison_bergeron_by_kurt_vonnegut.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home-For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay-Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again-The land that never has been yet-And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s,
ME-Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath-America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain-All, all the stretch of these great green states-And make America again!
4/17/2016
The Upside of Income Inequality
The Upside of Income Inequality
Gary Becker, Kevin M. Murphy
May 7, 2007 12:00 am | The American
Income inequality in China substantially widened, particularly between households
in the city and the countryside, after China began its rapid rate of economic
development around 1980. The average urban resident now makes 3.2 times as
much as the average rural resident, and among city dwellers alone, the top 10
percent makes 9.2 times as much as the bottom 10 percent. (#FN1)[1] (#FN1) ()But
at the same time that inequality rose, the number of Chinese who live in poverty fell
—from 260 million in 1978 to 42 million in 1998.[2] (#FN2) ()Despite the widening
gap in incomes, rapid economic development dramatically improved the lives of
China’s poor.
Politicians and many others in the United States have recently grown concerned that
earnings inequality has increased among Americans. But as the example of China—
or India, for that matter—illustrates, the rise in inequality does not occur in a
vacuum. In the case of China and India, the rise in inequality came along with an
acceleration of economic growth that raised the standard of living for both the rich
and the poor. In the United States, the rise in inequality accompanied a rise in the
payoff to education and other skills. We believe that the rise in returns on
investments in human capital is beneficial and desirable, and policies designed to
deal with inequality must take account of its cause.
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(http://www.aei.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/06/Figure%201.JPG)To show the importance to inequality of
the increased return to human capital, consider Figure 1, which shows the link
between earnings and education by displaying the wage premium received by
college-educated workers compared with high school graduates. In 1980, an
American with a college degree earned about 30 percent more than an American
who stopped education at high school. But, in recent years, a person with a college
education earned roughly 70 percent more. Meanwhile, the premium for having a
graduate degree increased from roughly 50 percent in 1980 to well over 100
percent today. The labor market is placing a greater emphasis on education,
dispensing rapidly rising rewards to those who stay in school the longest.
This trend has contributed significantly to the growth in overall earnings inequality
in the United States. And just as in China and India, this growing inequality gap is
associated with growing opportunity—in this case, the opportunity to advance
through education. The upward trend in the returns to education is not limited to
one segment of the population. Education premiums for women and African
Americans have increased as much as, or more than, the premiums for all workers.
Figure 2 shows that the growth in returns to education for women has paralleled
that for men over the past 25 years, but has remained at a somewhat higher level.
Figure 3 shows that returns for blacks have increased as much as those for whites.
As these two figures show, the potential to improve one’s labor-market prospects
through higher education is greater now than at any time in the recent past, and this
potential extends across gender and racial lines.
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(http://www.aei.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/06/Figure%202.JPG)The growth in returns to college has
generated a predictable response: as the education earnings gap increased, a larger
fraction of high school graduates went on to college. As Figure 4 shows, the pro‐
portion of men and women ages 20 to 25 who attended college jumped by about
half over the past 40 years, tracking the rise in the wage premium. When returns fell
in the 1970s, the fraction going on to college declined. The rise in returns since
1980 has been accompanied by a significant rise in the fraction going on to
()college.[3] (#FN3)
This increase in the proportion of persons going on to higher education is found
among all racial and ethnic groups, but it is particularly important for women, who,
in 2004, outnumbered men as students in degree-granting institutions of higher
education by 33 percent.
Women have also shifted toward higher-earnings fields, such as business, law, and
medicine: the number of women in graduate schools rose 66 percent between 1994
and 2004, while the number of men rose just 25 percent.[4] (#FN4) ()And the greater
education achievement of women compared to men is particularly prominent among
blacks and Latinos: the proportion of black women who attend colleges and
universities jumped from 24 percent to 43 percent between 1974 and 2003, while
the proportion of white men rose only from 41 percent to ()49 percent.[5] (#FN5)
The potential generated by higher returns to education extends from individuals to
the economy as a whole. Growth in the education level of the population has been a
significant source of rising wages, productivity, and living standards over the past
century. Higher returns to education will accelerate growth in living standards as
existing investments have a higher return, and additional investments in education
will be made in response to the higher returns. Gains from the higher returns will
not be limited to GDP and other measures of economic activity; education provides a
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wide range of benefits not captured in GDP, and these will grow more rapidly as well
due to the additional investments in schooling.
(http://www.aei.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/06/Figure%203.JPG)Why is the earnings gap widening?
Because the demand for educated and other skilled persons is growing. That is
hardly surprising, given developments in computers and the Internet, advances in
biotechnology, and a general shift in economic activity to more education-intensive
sectors, such as finance and professional services. Also, globalization has
encouraged the importing of products using relatively low-skilled labor from
abroad. At the same time, world demand has risen for the kinds of products and
services that are provided by high-skilled employees.
When calculating the returns to education, we look at the costs of education as well.
And even accounting for the rise in university tuition (it more than doubled, on
average, in constant dollars between 1980 and 2005), overall returns to college and
graduate study have increased substantially. Indeed, it appears that the increases in
tuition were partly induced by the greater return to college education. Pablo Peña, in
a Ph.D. dissertation in progress at the University of Chicago, argues convincingly
that tuition rose in part because students want to invest more in the quality of their
education, and increased spending per student by colleges is partly financed by
higher tuition levels.[6] (#FN6) ()More investment in the quality and quantity of
schooling will benefit both individuals and society.
This brings us to our punch line. Should an increase in earnings inequality due
primarily to higher rates of return on education and other skills be considered a
favorable rather than an unfavorable development? We think so. Higher rates of
return on capital are a sign of greater productivity in the economy, and that
inference is fully applicable to human capital as well as to physical capital. The initial
impact of higher returns to human capital is wider inequality in earnings (the same
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as the initial effect of higher returns on physical capital), but that impact becomes
more muted and may be reversed over time as young men and women invest more
in their human capital.
(http://www.aei.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/06/Figure%204.JPG)We conclude that the forces raising
earnings inequality in the United States are beneficial to the extent that they reflect
higher returns to investments in education and other human capital. Yet this
conclusion should not produce complacency, for the response so far to these higher
returns has been disturbingly limited. For example, why haven’t more high school
graduates gone on to a college education when the benefits are so apparent? Why
don’t more of those who go to college finish a four-year degree? (Only about half do
so.)[7] (#FN7) ()And why has the proportion of American youth who drop out of high
school, especially African-American and Hispanic males, remained fairly constant?
The answers to these and related questions lie partly in the breakdown of the
American family, and the resulting low skill levels acquired by many children in
elementary and secondary school—particularly individuals from broken households.
Cognitive skills tend to get developed at very early ages while, as our colleague
James Heckman has shown, noncognitive skills—such as study habits, getting to
appointments on time, and attitudes toward work—get fixed at later, although still
relatively young, ages. Most high school dropouts certainly appear to be seriously
deficient in the noncognitive skills that would enable them to take advantage of the
higher rates of return to education and other human capital.
So instead of lamenting the increased earnings gap caused by education,
policymakers and the public should focus attention on how to raise the fraction of
American youth who complete high school and then go on for a college education.
Solutions are not cheap or easy. But it will be a disaster if the focus remains so much
on the earnings inequality itself that Congress tries to interfere directly with this
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inequality rather than trying to raise the education levels of those who are now
being left behind.
For many, the solution to an increase in inequality is to make the tax structure more
progressive—raise taxes on high-income households and reduce taxes on lowincome households. While this may sound sensible, it is not. Would these same indi‐
viduals advocate a tax on going to college and a subsidy for dropping out of high
school in response to the increased importance of education? We think not. Yet
shifting the tax structure has exactly this effect.
A more sensible policy is to try to take greater advantage of the opportunities
afforded by the higher returns to human capital and encourage more human capital
investment. Attempts to raise taxes and impose other penalties on the higher
earnings that come from greater skills could greatly reduce the productivity of the
world’s leading economy by discouraging investments in its most productive and
precious form of capital—human capital.
Gary S. Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992, teaches at the
University of Chicago and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His
colleague at Chicago and Hoover, Kevin M. Murphy, was the 1997 winner of the John
Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, which goes to an
outstanding economist under age forty.
Chart illustrations by MacNeill and MacIntosh. Source for all figures: Current
Population Survey, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
(http://www.aei.org/publication/the-future-electric-grid/) ()[1] (#1) Dexter Roberts,
“China’s Widening Income Gap
(http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/feb2007/gb20070216_056285.htm?
chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives),” BusinessWeek,
February 16, 2007.
(http://www.aei.org/publication/the-future-electric-grid/) ()[2] (#2) “China: Two
Decades of Poverty Reduction
(http://www.undp.org/povertyreport/countryprofiles/china1.html),” Overcoming
Human Poverty: UNDP Poverty Report 2000, United Nations Development
Programme, 2000.
(http://www.aei.org/publication/the-future-electric-grid/) ()[3] (#3) U.S.
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Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics
(http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98).
(http://www.aei.org/publication/the-future-electric-grid/) ()[4] (#4) Ibid
(http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98).
(http://www.aei.org/publication/the-future-electric-grid/) ()[5] (#5) “Postsecondary
Participation Rates by Sex and Race/Ethnicity: 1974–2003
(http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005028.pdf),” Issue Brief, March 2005, National
Center for Education Statistics.
(http://www.aei.org/publication/the-future-electric-grid/) ()[6] (#6) Pablo A. Peña,
“What is the effect of colleges’ wealth on tuition fees?
(http://home.uchicago.edu/%7Epablo/)” Introduction to “Tuition and Wealth at
American Colleges,” University of Chicago, 2007.
(http://www.aei.org/publication/the-future-electric-grid/) ()[7] (#7) Associated
Press, “U.S. College Drop-out Rate Sparks Concern
(http://www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_6422.shtml),” September
27, 2006.
This article was found online at:
http://www.aei.org/publication/the-upside-of-income-inequality/
http://www.aei.org/publication/theupsideofincomeinequality/print/
7/7
HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God
and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else.
Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody
else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution,
and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people
crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George
and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a
perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short
bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap
radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government
transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to
keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d
forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar
alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh” said George.
“That dance-it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup, ” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very goodno better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sash weights
and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful
gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the
vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it
before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the
latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel a little envious.
“All the things they think up.”
“Urn,” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter
of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon
Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday- just
chimes. Kind of in honor of religion. ”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well-maybe make ’em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better than I do what normal is …
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