Who gets into Harvard is not America’s inequality problem
Too many Americans—and too many American economists in particular—have an unhealthy obsession with the 1%: How much money they make, how much wealth they have, how they got there, how to join their ranks, and so on. Worsening economic inequality is a real problem in the US, and there are understandable reasons for this fixation.
But the US would be better off focusing on more important challenges, such as how to increase productivity or improve the economic prospects of the bottom 50%. The latest manifestation of the country’s inequality obsession is the debate over the admission policies of a handful of elite schools.
This week, a new research paper addressed the issue of the 1% directly: It estimates that while children of lower-income families have slightly better odds of getting into elite schools (assuming they have similar scores) than upper middle-class students, children of the 1% have a much better chance than everyone else. This is an issue that is ‘elite’ almost by definition, since most colleges and universities don’t have highly selective admissions.
There are other issues where the debate is too centred on the competition between America’s upper middle class and the rich. Consider the discussion on urban housing in the US, which is increasingly focused on why desirable areas of many cities are so expensive, or the attention paid to student loan debt rather than other forms of debt that keep more vulnerable members of society down.
The discourse inevitably affects policy, resulting in student debt relief, an expansion of the child income tax credit to higher earners, industrial policy for highly skilled jobs, even a regulatory crackdown on artificial intelligence (AI). True, some of these programmes also
. Read more on livemint.com
