Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Stephen Maher and Barbara Yaffe have learned to be duly skeptical of the Cons' motives when it comes to Senate patronage. But John Ibbitson still has a ways to go - as he's apparently still buying Con spin about new provinces holding Senate elections which has long since been overtaken by events.

- Meanwhile, Yaffe notes that the Cons' direct attacks on anybody who doesn't want to make oil industry profits the chief goal of public policy will only call into question the validity of their own public assessment processes. And Dr. Dawg replies to Joe Oliver's shilling for the tar sands by testing who actually makes decisions based on blind faith rather than any willingness to consider reality.

- Paul Krugman points out that the U.S.' inequality crisis is just as obvious when it comes to opportunity as to condition:

Americans are much more likely than citizens of other nations to believe that they live in a meritocracy. But this self-image is a fantasy: as a report in The Times last week pointed out, America actually stands out as the advanced country in which it matters most who your parents were, the country in which those born on one of society’s lower rungs have the least chance of climbing to the top or even to the middle.

And if you ask why America is more class-bound in practice than the rest of the Western world, a large part of the reason is that our government falls down on the job of creating equal opportunity.

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition and receive inadequate health care. It continues once children reach school age, where they encounter a system in which the affluent send their kids to good, well-financed public schools or, if they choose, to private schools, while less-advantaged children get a far worse education.

Once they reach college age, those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to go to college — and vastly less likely to go to a top-tier school — than those luckier in their parentage. At the most selective, “Tier 1” schools, 74 percent of the entering class comes from the quarter of households that have the highest “socioeconomic status”; only 3 percent comes from the bottom quarter.

And if children from our society’s lower rungs do manage to make it into a good college, the lack of financial support makes them far more likely to drop out than the children of the affluent, even if they have as much or more native ability. One long-term study by the Department of Education found that students with high test scores but low-income parents were less likely to complete college than students with low scores but affluent parents — loosely speaking, that smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.
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(S)omeone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

- Finally, congratulations to Craig Scott for earning the NDP's nomination in Toronto-Danforth.