Fewer than 1 percent of Americans are millionaires, but almost one in three believe they’ll end up among that group at some point

I love those statistics, although I always cock them up. This is from an article on Alternet, driven by new research from the Brookings Institution.

… new research suggests the United States’ much-ballyhooed upward mobility is a myth, and one that’s slipping further from reality with each new generation. On average, younger Americans are not doing better than their parents did, it’s harder to move up the economic ladder in the United States than it is in a number of other wealthy countries, and a person in today’s work force is as likely to experience downward mobility as he or she is to move up.

Moreover, the single greatest predictor of how much an American will earn is how much their parents make. In short, the United States, contrary to popular belief, is not a true meritocracy, and the American worker is getting a bum deal, the worst of both worlds. Not only is a significant portion of the middle class hanging on by the narrowest of threads, not only do fewer working people have secure retirements to look forward to, not only are nearly one in seven Americans uninsured, but working people also enjoy less opportunity to pull themselves up by their bootstraps than those in a number of other advanced economies.

…

Several studies released in recent years suggest that, contrary to popular opinion, Americans enjoy significantly less upward mobility than citizens of a number of other industrialized nations (some of the studies can be accessed here, here and here). German workers have 1.5 times the mobility of Americans, Canada is nearly 2.5 times more mobile and Denmark is 3 times more mobile. Norway, Finland, Sweden and France (France!) are all more mobile societies than the United States. Of the countries included in the studies, the United States ranked near the bottom; only the United Kingdom came in lower.

Why France earns that reaction, I don’t know. Not being from here, I am only surprised that the UK was lower, and even then not by much, having lived there. Of course upward income mobility is poor, here – everyone not from here knows that.

Anyway, it’s an interesting article.

“A day after the Federal Reserve disappointed investors with a modest cut in interest rates…”

Was there anything so ridiculous as the petulance of Jim Cramer’s wall street?

A day after the Federal Reserve disappointed investors with a modest cut in interest rates, central banks in North America and Europe on Wednesday announced the most aggressive infusion of capital into the banking system since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

Most market specialists and economists welcomed the effort but concluded that it would probably have only limited success in addressing broader problems in the global economy and the credit markets.

In response, stocks initially surged in New York, but most of the early gains dissipated in afternoon trading as the market moved wildly up and down through the day.

Over at the blog The Big Picture:

We continue to discuss the technical aspects of the Dow action in the office. There is a divergence of informed opinions, ranging from “Breakout over 1500 SPX was bullish” to “Let’s wait and see” to “a major top is forming.”

…

The strong opening gap yesterday, followed by a near 400 point reversal, only to close marginally higher is, in my opinion, simply awful technical action.

It was concisely put over at the Wall Street Journal (linked out-to at the Big Picture):

A day of exceptionally volatile gyrations in stocks left traders exhausted, and showed how nervous investors still are about the market’s prospects.

Finally, Eco 1 students: I’ve mentioned, several times now, the over-investment that drove a lot of the dot-com-busted recession earlier in the decade. In the same post, the Big Picture carries an excellent illustration of (a) precisely that and (b) why the current threats to jump out of Blue Chip Windows is pure glutton’s melodrama.

Dear Sir, I have a complaint

Sorry. I’ve been listening to Radiohead.

Two perspectives on the climate change ’stuff’ of Bali: Politics-as-usual

Nobel laureate Al Gore accused the United States on Thursday of blocking progress at the U.N. climate conference, and European nations threatened to boycott U.S.-led climate talks next month unless Washington compromises on emissions reductions.

…

The United States, Japan and several other governments are refusing to accept language in a draft document suggesting that industrialized nations consider cutting emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent by 2020, saying specific targets would limit the scope of future talks.

European nations said they may boycott a U.S.-led climate meeting next month unless Washington compromises.

“No result in Bali means no Major Economies Meeting,” said Sigmar Gabriel, top EU environment official from Germany, referring to a series of separate climate talks initiated by President Bush in September. “This is the clear position of the EU. I do not know what we should talk about if there is no target.”

The second, fairly basic logic (I had seen this earlier in the Guardian, but not gotten around to mentioning it).

On a filthy day last week, as governments gathered in Bali to prevaricate about climate change, a group of us tried to put this policy into effect. We swarmed into the opencast coal mine being dug at Ffos-y-fran in South Wales and occupied the excavators, shutting down the works for the day. We were motivated by a fact which the wise heads in Bali have somehow missed: if fossil fuels are extracted, they will be used.

Most of the governments of the rich world now exhort their citizens to use less carbon. They encourage us to change our lightbulbs, insulate our lofts, turn our TVs off at the wall. In other words, they have a demand-side policy for tackling climate change. But as far as I can determine not one of them has a supply-side policy. None seeks to reduce the supply of fossil fuel. So the demand-side policy will fail. Every barrel of oil and tonne of coal that comes to the surface will be burnt.