April 22, 2012

On April 17, 2012, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011, an increase of $138 billion over the previous year.  The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion. Why are military expenditures continuing to increase, indeed, why aren’t they substantially decreasing, given the governmental austerity measures of recent years? Amid the economic crisis that began in late 2008 (and which continues to the present day), most governments have been cutting back their spending dramatically on education, libraries, healthcare, housing, parks, and other vital social services. There have been no corresponding cuts in military budgets. In fact, this past year, nations spent more money on the military than at any time in human history. In the good ol’ USofA, House Republicans have been trying to wriggle out of the agreement they made in August that will force deep cuts in military spending. Now we know how they propose to do it: They will take tens of billions out of programs for the poorest Americans, particularly food stamps, along with health care for the middle class. The House Agriculture Committee voted on Wednesday to cut $33 billion over the next decade out of food stamps. That would immediately end benefits for two million people, and reduce benefits for the remaining 44 million people who use the program. A family of four would find their benefits lowered by $57 a month beginning in September, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The committee trimmed job training for food-stamp recipients by 72 percent; 280,000 students would no longer be eligible for free meals. The budget deal reached last August — the one Republicans triggered with their disastrous debt-ceiling crisis — calls for a painful sequester of $600 billion to both military and domestic spending over a decade. The Republicans could have accepted the military cuts they had agreed to or they could have joined with Democrats in reducing the cuts by raising taxes on the rich. Instead, the 2013 budget, written by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, put all the cuts on the domestic side. Representative Mike Conaway, a Texas Republican, explained that the Constitution requires Congress to pay for defense but that food stamps and other domestic programs were lower priorities. Agriculture was one of six committees ordered to find cuts to protect the military budget. The Ways and Means Committee has to cut $53 billion, and its members have already begun taking most of that money out of health care reform, starting with subsidies for insurance exchanges. The Financial Services Committee is planning to save $35 billion by eliminating the F.D.I.C.’s ability to take over failing banks, and hobbling the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with a $5.4 billion cut. The agriculture committee, told to find $33 billion in cuts, could have substantially reduced the farm subsidies that now amount to more than $15 billion a year. Instead, the entire amount is coming out of food stamps. Makes your heart swell with pride, doesn’t it.

April 19, 2012

About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country's north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female education. Since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban, which banned education for women and girls, females have returned to schools, especially in Kabul. But periodic attacks still occur against girls, teachers, and their school buildings. "We are 100 percent sure that the water they drank inside their classes was poisoned. This is either the work of those who are against girls' education or irresponsible armed individuals," said Jan Mohammad Nabizada, a spokesman for the education department in northern Takhar province. Some of the 150 girls, who suffered from headaches and vomiting, were in critical condition, while others were able to go home after treatment in hospital, the officials said. They said they knew the water had been poisoned because a larger tank used to fill the affected water jugs was not contaminated. None of the officials blamed any particular group for the attack, fearing retribution from anyone named. In the U.S., the Republican National Committee denied any involvement and said this action was not part of their ongoing war on women. Their spokesman reiterated that they have focused their efforts against American women, though they do much admire Taliban methods and the way they treat women.

April 17, 2012

Data released for Equal Pay Day show that wages for Utah women remain considerably lower than for men. Women in Utah are paid 69 cents for every dollar paid to men — amounting to a yearly gap of $14,446. And with nearly 85,500 Utah households led by women, the new data show that these gaps harm families and the state economy, according to a report by National Partnership for Women & Families. A woman working full time, year round receives $32,163 per year, while the median yearly pay for a man is $46,609. Women are paid 69 cents for every dollar paid to men, amounting to a yearly gap of $14,446 between full-time working men and women. African American and Latina women working full time are paid 52 cents for every dollar paid to men, a difference of more than $22,200 per year. Women working full time, year round are paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to all men. African American women are paid 62 cents and Latinas are paid 54 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. The analysis ranks Utah 48th among the 50 states in gender-based wage gap. Only Louisiana, ranked 49th, and Wyoming, 50th, fare worse. The gap in earnings for Utah women isn’t all that surprising, considering their poor college graduation rates according to the Utah Department of Workforce Services. Utah has the worst disparity in the nation between men and women earning bachelor’s degrees or higher — a difference of 6 percentage points. The Utah education gap more than doubles that of the next closest state, Idaho, at 2.4 percentage points, while the national average is 0.6 points. Yes, the Patriarchal Order still thrives in Utah.

April 14, 2012

New analyses of capital punishment show gross injustice in its application and enormous costs in continuing to impose it. In Connecticut, a powerful, comprehensive study provided evidence that state death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime. Decades of research show that racial bias pervades death penalty cases. Minority defendants with white victims are much more likely to be sentenced to death than others; 35 percent of those executed nationally since 1976 were black, though blacks currently make up 12.6 percent of the population. The problem of inadequate counsel permeates the system, with many indigent defendants sentenced to death after major blunders by court-assigned lawyers. And a horrific number of innocent people have ended up on death row: 17 convicts with death sentences have been exonerated with DNA evidence since 1993, 123 with other evidence since 1973. Any careful evaluation leads to what the American Law Institute concluded after a review of decades of executions: the system cannot be fixed. It is practically impossible to rid the legal process of biases driven by race, class, and politics. Not to mention that it is immoral for a nation to kill its own people. Capital punishment, by overwhelming evidence, should be abolished throughout the United States.

April 10, 2012

When it comes to “reforming the global financial system”, regulators have focused on banks. Weakened by the 2008 crisis, destabilised by the eurozone sovereign debt mess, and then hit with higher capital requirements, traditional lenders are on the retreat. Meanwhile, the "shadow banking" system, a phrase used to encompass a broad range of institutions and mechanisms, from hedge funds to "repo" markets, has recovered more rapidly and is poised to usurp banks in a variety of ways. Regulators are now grappling with how to deal with a vast sector that has little or no supervision. Shadow banking was a fundamental cause of the banking crisis; it is not a separate phenomenon from banking but a deeply related one. In the run-up to 2008, Countrywide, a lightly-regulated mortgage originator, wrote bad loans but sold them on to buyers including banks. AIG, ostensibly an insurance group, wrote credit default swaps against mortgage-backed securities held by banks. The banks used repo markets to leverage and fund their investments for as long as they could. But the post-crisis world has seen banks selling assets to non-bank financial groups to improve their capital ratios, meet regulatory requirements, and reassure their own lenders -- such as money market funds, themselves a fundamental part of shadow banking -- that they are sufficiently resilient. This has stimulated growth in previously small areas of lending, especially in Europe and Asia. In parts of Europe large retailers and industrial groups have begun providing funding to smaller companies, including their suppliers. A similar trend away from bank finance has benefited credit hedge funds, and in the leveraged finance world, new bespoke funding suppliers have sprung up. And Regulators have underestimated the distortive effect of tightening the rules for banks -- a distortion that could sow the seeds of the next crisis. Some worry that the growth of non-bank lending and the practice of borrowing short-term to lend long-term simply allow new, unmonitored bubbles to grow unchecked until they once again drag down the banking system and the larger economy. Here we go again.

April 8, 2012

Letters written by George Washington, Henry David Thoreau’s pencil-drawn map of Walden Pond, and Mark Twain’s manuscript of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” are among the items from the New York Public Library’s American collections that will soon be digitized and made available to the public online. The library, aided by a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation, has already begun digitizing the Thomas Addis Emmet Collection, which covers the early years of the United States and includes a copy of the Declaration of Independence written in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, manuscript minutes of the Annapolis Convention, and the 1786 meeting at which delegates unanimously called for a constitutional convention. Next January the library will start digitizing about 35,000 pages from the Henry W. and Alfred A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, including nearly all the library’s papers of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his wife Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Thoreau, Twain, and Walt Whitman. The library’s online digital gallery already includes more than 800,000 documents, maps, photographs, and other items from its collection. Fantastic!

April 5, 2012

According to NOAA, March 2012 will go down as the warmest March in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895. In addition, the three-month period of January, February, and March was the warmest first quarter ever recorded in the Lower 48 states. The average was 42 degrees Fahrenheit, 6 full degrees above the long-term average. A staggering 15,292 warm temperature records were broken, (7,755 record highs and 7,517 record high overnight lows). The warm temperatures also contributed to conditions that were favorable for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. There were 223 preliminary tornado reports during March, a month that averages 80 tornadoes, according to NOAA's Storm Prediction Center.

April 3, 2012

There’s good news and bad news. As befits my always sunny worldview, we’ll do the good news first. According to new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about one-fifth of U.S. adults have read an e-book in the past year. And if you expand that to include Americans over 16 who have used an e-reader device or app to read news articles or magazine-style features, the figure is 43%. E-book users tend to read more often than people who read only print material, Pew found. In particular, they read more books. A typical e-book user read 24 books in the past year, compared with the 15 books reported by typical non-e-book users. Also, a third of people who read e-content say they now spend more time reading than they did before e-books. This is especially true for people who own tablets and e-book readers. Currently 28% of Americans age 18 and older own at least one tablet or an e-book reader. And that's not even counting the people who read books on a Smartphone or iPod Touch app. For now, print reading material still rules the consumer market, however. Pew found that nearly three-fourths of U.S. adults read a printed book in 2011, and 11% listened to an audiobook. Print books are especially popular when people read to children. But, as common sense would dictate, print books are also the most popular choice when people want to borrow or lend a book, though the survey also found that just slightly more people prefer e-books over print for reading in bed. That’s the good news. On the flip side, Pew noted that nearly 20% of U.S. adults said they had not read a single book, electronic or print, in the past year. And that is indeed bad news.

March 31, 2012

By the end of the decade, exaFLOP computers are predicted to go online. Those machines will perform at least 1,000 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers. Supercomputer performance is measured in FLOPS, an acronym for FLoating Point Operations per Second. "Exa" is a metric prefix which stands for quintillion (or a billion billion). Exascale computers will perform approximately as many operations per second as 50 million laptops. Currently, the fastest supercomputers operate at the petaFLOP level, performing in excess of one quadrillion (or a million billion) operations per second. The first computer to break through the petaFLOP barrier was IBM's Roadrunner in 2008. But its reign as the fastest computer in the world didn't last long, with the Cray Jaguar installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States becoming the quickest with a performance of 1.75 petaFLOPS in 2009. Today, the fastest computer in the world is Japan's K computer developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, and installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science, in Kobe, Japan according to TOP500 -- a project that tracks trends in high-performance computing. It operates at over 10 petaFLOPS. The K computer contains an incredible 88,128 computer processors and is made up of 864 refrigerator-sized cabinets. It is more than four times faster than its nearest rival, China's NUDT YH MPP computer at 2.57 petaflops. Physically, exascale computing won't get any bigger, and might even get a little smaller. But the number of processors will rise substantially to anywhere between one million and 100 million. But, there are severe technology barriers. The current projections suggest that power consumption of exascale computers will be 100 megawatts. Now, power consumption of supercomputers in general is not sustainable, so it's currently impossible to build a suitable facility and have enough power. But, the United States, China, Japan, the European Union, and Russia are all investing millions of dollars in supercomputer research. SkyNet here we come.

March 28, 2012

The ideological nature of the health care case was obvious on the last day of oral argument. By the time the proceedings were over, much of what the conservative justices said in court seemed like part of a politically driven exercise — especially because the issues addressed on Wednesday were not largely constitutional in nature. In fact, they were the kinds of policy questions that are properly left to Congress and state governments to answer, not the Supreme Court. The court heard arguments on the issue of “severability” — the question of what should happen with the rest of the 2,700-page statute if the requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance is struck down. The insurance mandate was effectively reduced to a bumper sticker by the opponents in their constitutional challenge, and the entire law reduced to little more than an appendage to the mandate. “My approach would be to say that if you take the heart out of the statute, the statute’s gone,” Justice Antonin Scalia said, a position held by the law’s opponents, who want to demolish the whole thing. But H. Bartow Farr III, the lawyer appointed by the court to argue for upholding all other parts of the law if the mandate falls, showed how careless and wrong that view is. His presentation compellingly explained what Congress actually passed: a thoughtfully constructed, comprehensive solution to the enormous problems of insufficient insurance coverage and ever-mounting costs of health care. As Mr. Farr made clear, the fate of the mandate should not determine the survival of the other elements of the law — like prohibiting insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charging them higher fees — which can operate without the mandate. Under general principles, courts must avoid nullifying more of a law than is necessary. Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that it would be more extreme to preserve part of the statute than to strike down the whole thing because that would alter Congress’s intent. He could avoid this problem by upholding the mandate. The last issue before the court was the law’s expansion of Medicaid, which will be financed mostly by federal funds. The challengers contend the expansion coerces them to cover more poor people and that the penalty for refusing to do so would be a cutoff of federal money. This is a bizarre view that treats Medicaid, a voluntary federal-state partnership, as an affront to state sovereignty. There is no legitimate constitutional question on this issue. It is disturbing that the conservative justices seriously entertained the opponents’ argument. But it does fit perfectly into the judicial activism of the right wing.

March 26, 2012

New statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else. Even in a country used to income inequality, these thefts are stunning. In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households. Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent. Meanwhile, the bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income. And now, House Republicans just passed a budget that is an unbelievable mess of highly regressive tax cuts, large but unspecified reductions in discretionary spending (a category that importantly includes education, infrastructure, and research and development), and an evisceration of programs devoted to lifting those at the bottom, including unemployment insurance, food stamps, earned income tax credits, and many more. Obviously, policies of this sort would exacerbate the very problem of income inequality that most needs fixing. But that is clearly fundamental to their plan to turn the United States into a banana republic. God Bless America.

March 24, 2012

Intense rainfalls are getting bigger and more frequent, causing local governments, engineers and landowners to rethink whether sewer systems and other drainage features are up to their tasks. The storm water filtration pond near Cedar Lake in Minneapolis, for instance, needed to be cleaned out six years after it was built, instead of the 25 years designers expected. Researchers point directly at a warming climate as the cause. Warmer air holds more water vapor, and a longer storm season means intense storms can occur more frequently in what once were regarded as the off-seasons. As more northerly latitudes have warmed, the storm-producing clashes between warm and cold air masses have moved northward as well, a key reason why the Upper Midwest has seen a steep increase in extreme precipitation. The Upper Midwest saw a 31 percent increase in "intense" rainfalls (the statistical 1 percent events) from 1958 to 2007, over previous decades, according to the National Climactic Data Center. That was the second-highest increase among eight U.S. regions, including Alaska and Hawaii. New England and the Northeast saw a 67 percent increase. Overall, intense doses of precipitation have become more frequent and more intense in recent decades than at any other time in the historical record and account for a larger percentage of total precipitation, according to a study by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. Meanwhile, recent weather in Minnesota is hinting that a drought that has persisted for about seven months across much of the state (longer in the Arrowhead) might be loosening its grip. But those kinds of variations don't mean the longer-term trends of increases in intense rainfall might also reverse quickly; excessive rain has been overpowering drought trends in recent decades. At the same time, the classic climate warming scenario dictates that both excess rain and drought are likely simultaneously, as heat evaporates moisture from the land, then dumps it elsewhere in spotty, unpredictable, summer-storm patterns.

March 22, 2012

Today is World Water Day. The WWF has warned of an escalation in the global water crisis, saying that more than 50 violent conflicts have erupted around the world over water usage just since the turn of the century. WWF said demand for energy and food threatens to exacerbate the already simmering water crisis and would lead to more disputes. Leaders and environmental experts recently gathered in Marseilles for a week-long World Water Forum to discuss access to clean water, water rights, and the use of modern water-related technologies. Demand for water from agriculture, which already accounts for around 70 percent of the freshwater used globally, is expected to rise by at least 19 percent by 2050. A separate study published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) forecast that water demand would rise by 55 percent by 2050, with 40 percent of people likely to live in areas of potential water stress. Not only is there a growing crisis because of the lack of potable water, more than one million people die each year from consuming contaminated water.

March 19, 2012

European researchers announced that they had again measured the speed of a subatomic particle that a September experiment suggested traveled faster than the speed of light. If it had, that would violate Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which underlies much of modern physics. Einstein’s theory of relativity says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, approximately 186,282 miles per second. That speed factors into all kinds of calculations, from estimates about the size and age of the universe to the radius of black holes. The research team that tried to verify the earlier result found that the particles, neutrinos, do not in fact travel faster than light. The team, called Icarus, measured the speed of neutrinos fired from CERN to a detector 453 miles away in Italy. Opera was the team that reported in September that its tests appeared to show neutrinos speeding faster than light. Doubts about the Opera results were heightened last month when researchers said they had found a flaw in the technical setup that could have distorted the experiment’s figures. The Icarus team’s results came from a trial run for a longer experiment planned to take place in April or May. The Opera team, too, will repeat its experiment, this time with the technical glitches ironed out. So, Einstein is still right, at least for now.

March 17, 2012

As the Chinese government moves ahead on a multibillion-dollar effort to blanket the country with surveillance cameras, one American company stands to profit: Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney. Chinese cities are installing surveillance systems with hundreds of thousands of cameras. In December, a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust has holdings purchased the video surveillance division of a Chinese company that claims to be the largest supplier to the government’s Safe Cities program, a highly advanced monitoring system that allows the authorities to watch over university campuses, hospitals, mosques, and movie theaters from centralized command posts. The Bain-owned company, Uniview Technologies, produces what it calls “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that enable police officials in different jurisdictions to share images in real time through the Internet. Previous projects have included an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site. While ostensibly for combating crime, human rights advocates say in China such surveillance systems are used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” said Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008. The financial disclosure forms Mitt Romney filed last August show that a blind trust in the name of his wife, Ann Romney, held a stake in the Bain Capital Asia fund that purchased Uniview. Mr. Romney reported on his August disclosure forms that he and his wife earned a minimum of $5.6 million from Bain assets held in their blind trusts and retirement accounts. Bain employees and executives are also among the largest donors to his campaign, and their contributions accounted for 10 percent of the money received over the past year by Restore Our Future, the pro-Romney “super PAC.” Bain’s decision to enter China’s fast-growing surveillance industry raises questions about the direct role that American corporations play in outfitting authoritarian governments with technology that can be used to repress their own citizens. All the while, Romney has frequently called for a hard line against the Chinese government’s suppression of religious freedom and political dissent. And, as with previous deals involving American companies, Bain’s acquisition of Uniview violates the spirit, if not necessarily the letter, of American sanctions imposed on Beijing after the deadly crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square. Those rules bar American corporations from exporting to China “crime-control” products like those that process fingerprints, make photo identification cards, or use night vision technology. While privately profiting from these semi-illegal exports, Mr. Romney publicly has accused the Obama administration of placing economic concerns above human rights in managing relations with China, and he has called on the White House to offer more vigorous support of those who criticize the Chinese Communist Party. Mitt, once again, hypocrisy is thy name.

March 16, 2012

After 244 years, the Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print. The move is an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age - and of competition from Wikipedia. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, will focus now on its online encyclopedias and curriculum for schools. "It's a rite of passage in this new era," Jorge Cauz, the company's president. "Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it's much more expansive and it has multimedia." The last print version of the encyclopedia is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project. Even though I love the capabilities of the internet, the loss of more books makes me sad. The news brought an outpouring on Twitter. This picture is of the first edition from 1768. Rest in Peace.

March 15, 2012

33 years ago today:

Happy Birthday, Josh!

March 8, 2012

The Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee in the House celebrated International Women’s Day by holding a hearing to promote a mean-spirited and constitutionally suspect bill called the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act. It is both an attack on women’s rights and on the basic principles of federalism. Currently, thirty-two states have laws requiring teenagers to consult their parents or get their permission, or else seek a judge’s permission, before obtaining an abortion. The new bill would expand the reach of those restrictions by imposing a mandatory parental notification requirement and 24-hour waiting period on women under 18 who travel outside their home state to get the procedure. Anyone who helps the minor in the absence of judicial authorization without first informing her parent or legal guardian — and that includes grandparents, older siblings, and clergy — would be subject to criminal and civil penalties that include up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine. Under threat of criminal and civil penalties, doctors also would be forced to comply with a burdensome legal regimen involving the interaction of varying state laws and those of the provider’s home state. A similar measure is pending in the Senate. The bill not only isolates desperate young women, it increases the chances they will resort to unsafe alternatives for termination of their pregnancies or delay the procedure, making it more dangerous. In their zeal to force teenagers to bear children against their will, the measure’s sponsors included no exception to protect a teenager’s health. That is a clear violation of Supreme Court precedent, not to metion fundamental decency. It is also in keeping with the rest of the right-wing agenda on contraception and abortion. While claiming to want to get government off our backs, Republicans are trying to get it firmly jammed between women’s legs.

March 1, 2012

Nearly half of the world's children are growing up in slums, and the numbers are only expected to increase as the world's cities continue growing, according to UNICEF’s State of the World's Children 2012 report. The agency projects the urban population of 7 billion to balloon to include two-thirds of the more than 9 billion people expected to live on earth by 2050. But the quality of life in towns and cities, particularly in those of the developing and emerging countries, tends to be poor. Ever more families are moving into the world's cities, so already one in three children is growing up in a slum. In many of the world's slums up to 50 percent of children are malnourished and excluded from medical care and education, despite the fact that cities generally offer more schools, playgrounds, and hospitals than rural areas. The number of malnourished and undernourished children also is increasing. In India, 54 percent of the poorest children in slums are physically or mentally disabled because of inadequate nourishment. Unhygienic and cramped living conditions lead to more epidemics, tuberculosis, diarrhea, and pneumonia.

February 17, 2012

Education was historically considered the great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. It is the engine of a thriving democracy. A body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects and American democracy. It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially. A Stanford University study has found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students has grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s. In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s. The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. And, the data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend. A study by researchers at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by only 20 percent. The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989. Greatest country in the world, right? Banana republic here we come.