{"id":4979,"date":"2011-10-25T09:26:38","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T13:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=4979"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:08:03","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:08:03","slug":"inequality-economic-growth-and-the-capitalist-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/10\/25\/inequality-economic-growth-and-the-capitalist-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Inequality, Economic Growth, And The Capitalist State"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> Born Poor?<\/em> by Corey Pein in the Sante Fe Reporter. <\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> Consider these two numbers. Don\u2019t worry, there won\u2019t be a quiz.<\/p>\n

The first number is 3,500.<\/p>\n

The second is 32.<\/p>\n

The first is how many jobs Santa Fe County lost in 2009, according to the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions.<\/p>\n

The second number is how many jobs the state Economic Development Department claims to have created in Santa Fe last year.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take a genius to see that something is wrong with this equation.<\/p>\n

But Samuel Bowles is a genius\u2014or, at least, a certified smart person. Bowles heads the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, which is home to dozens of big brains imported from all over the world. If he\u2019s right, those troubling job numbers are only the start of New Mexico\u2019s problems.<\/p>\n

Indeed, if Bowles is right, the state needs to completely rethink the way it does economic development.<\/p>\n

\u201cBowles is a very well-educated guy with a real interesting background. He\u2019s not of the ilk of most economists up in Santa Fe,\u201d Kim Posich, executive director of the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, says. \u201cHis ideas are not always run-of-the-mill.\u201d<\/p>\n

With haves becoming have-nots at an alarming rate, now is a terrible time for run-of-the-mill ideas.<\/p>\n

Like most states, New Mexico\u2019s economic policy is aimed at attracting corporations\u2014and the bigger the better. In his Jan. 19 State of the State speech to the New Mexico state Legislature, Gov. Bill Richardson promised to \u201coppose any tax increase that hurts our efforts to keep the state economically competitive and create new jobs\u2014such as increasing personal income taxes, rolling back our capital gains tax cuts or decreasing business tax incentives.\u201d<\/p>\n

He isn\u2019t far out of step with President Barack Obama who, in his State of the Union speech nine days later, called for the elimination of \u201call capital gains taxes on small business investment\u201d and a new \u201ctax incentive for all businesses, large and small, to invest in new plants and equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is brainpower behind both arguments.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost economists would support the argument the governor has made,\u201d Tom Clifford, chief economist for the Legislative Finance Committee, tells SFR. \u201cSam Bowles would probably disagree.\u201d<\/p>\n

In so many words, yes. Bowles steers clear of politics, but his findings\u2014gleaned from decades of poring over demographic surveys, other economists\u2019 research and in-person visits to places like the slums of India\u2014have obvious relevance to lawmakers\u2019 debates within the Roundhouse.<\/p>\n

Especially when it comes to how those thousands of out-of-work New Mexicans might regain respectable livelihoods.<\/p>\n

As becomes evident within a few minutes in his company, Bowles is a man in demand\u2014at least by his SFI comrades. Institute staff, students and fellow faculty stop him every few minutes to ask about this upcoming meeting or that piece of data.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the kitchen, a colleague asks about buying a textbook: Should she get it from Amazon or download the Kindle version? Bowles quickly rules out the Kindle because it makes the text impossible to share. Reading between the lines, Bowles\u2019 choice reveals the hidden symbolism of each medium: If the paperback is Karl Marx, the Kindle is Ayn Rand.<\/p>\n

A lifelong academic, Bowles, 70, lacks the polish and quotability of today\u2019s celebrity economists, such as Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, \u201ccreative class\u201d prophet Richard Florida or New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. However, Bowles tackles bigger questions than the pop economists. \u201cIts scope is cosmic,\u201d he says of his work at SFI.<\/p>\n

Bowles\u2019 most recent paper, published in the October 2009 issue of Science, was a huge project with 25 collaborators. It examines how wealth is transferred from parents to children in hunter-gatherer societies versus agricultural societies.
\nThat might seem distant from the busy unemployment offices on Guadalupe Street. But everyone can relate to his chosen subject: inequality. He studies the economic differences between people with the same discipline that Jane Goodall studies chimpanzees or Stephen Hawking studies the cosmos.<\/p>\n

Bowles\u2019 course was set in 1968, when he was an assistant professor at Harvard, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to his department looking for advice on the next stage of his social justice campaign.
\n\u201cWe were just elated that we could use economics, which we had so painstakingly learned, to answer questions that Dr. King thought were important,\u201d Bowles tells SFR. \u201cWe were also extremely angry that we were totally unable to answer the questions on the basis of having gotten a PhD at Harvard.\u201d<\/p>\n

King\u2019s assassination that year cut short the equality movement.<\/p>\n

It was also the year that Bowles\u2019 intellectual nemesis, Milton Friedman, proposed the idea of a \u201cnatural\u201d rate of unemployment, a concept still employed by federal bureaucrats. Friedman, who died in 2006, was the father of a free-market school of economics at the University of Chicago. Friedman popularized the notion that government intervention in the economy does more harm than good. When Richardson talks about keeping taxes low, he\u2019s channeling the conventional economic wisdom that evolved after Friedman.<\/p>\n

Most economists in 1968 thought of inequality as \u201csomebody else\u2019s problem,\u201d Bowles tells SFR. \u201cI actually was denied the right to teach a graduate course in inequality because it was said not to be economics.\u201d
\nIt wasn\u2019t always thus.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe founders of the discipline of economics, almost to a man\u2014and they were only men\u2014thought that the problem of distribution between classes\u2014they used the word classes\u2014was the key to understanding why nations grew or not,\u201d Bowles says.<\/p>\n

What Bowles sees as the essence of his profession\u2014problems of wealth distribution\u2014the Friedmanites see as the road to hell.<\/p>\n

In the years of easy credit, Friedmanites had the advantage. The recession has shifted the debate in favor of thinkers like Bowles.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the wake of what happened in the last year, it\u2019s much easier for an economist to describe himself as being liberal, maybe even Social Democratic,\u201d Henry Farrell, a political science associate professor at George Washington University, tells SFR. \u201cSam Bowles is still unashamedly and unabashedly a radical\u2014God bless him.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Farrell says, Bowles\u2019 radicalism kept him from finding a wider audience.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s the free marketeers who have a hard time being taken seriously. Last month, The New Yorker described defections and \u201cturmoil\u201d within the Chicago School. Even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a hero to free marketeers, admits that his way of understanding the world was wrong.<\/p>\n

Bowles is keenly aware that this crisis presents an opportunity. \u201cIt\u2019s not just that the Chicago School is on the ropes\u2014it\u2019s that people are much more sympathetic to people who have less income,\u201d Bowles says. \u201cThat attitude\u2014\u2018Hey, it could happen to me\u2019\u2014is something the Great Depression taught us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sympathy was forgotten in the boom times. But thanks to the hardships of today, \u201cit\u2019s coming back with a vengeance,\u201d Bowles says.<\/p>\n

With it, the influence of what Farrell calls \u201cthe Santa Fe approach to economics\u201d may also be growing.<\/p>\n

Last year, Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. \u201cShe\u2019s not a radical by any stretch of the imagination but, in terms of the methods she uses and the questions she\u2019s interested in, she\u2019s closer to Bowles than anybody. She is probably the only Nobel Prize winner in the last 20 years to have cited Bowles extensively and to be genuinely influenced by him,\u201d Farrell says.<\/p>\n

Ostrom doesn\u2019t distance herself from that assessment. \u201cI have great respect for professor Samuel Bowles,\u201d she writes in an email to SFR. \u201cI have worked with several of his PhDs who do simply outstanding experimental research.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Bowles has a following among people who think for a living, the people who actually make decisions have some catching up to do.<\/p>\n

And so here, in plain English, is the implication of Bowles\u2019 basic ideas: The US and New Mexico will keep falling behind until they learn to share the wealth.<\/p>\n

More numbers, for your consideration:<\/p>\n

45.7<\/p>\n

23<\/p>\n

The first number is the \u201cGini coefficient\u201d for New Mexico. The Gini is an expression economists use to measure equality or inequality in a society.<\/p>\n

Zero describes the ultimate level playing field, a nonexistent land in which everyone has all the same stuff. A completely unequal society, in which one person has sole control of literally everything, would have a Gini of 100. New Mexico\u2019s Gini score (45.7) reveals this state is more unequal than most. Utah is the most egalitarian state (with a 41.3 Gini), while the District of Columbia (53.7) is the most economically polarized, according to the most recent Census report, from 2006.<\/p>\n

The second figure, 23, is the Gini for Sweden, the world\u2019s most egalitarian country. Whereas most of Europe, Canada and Australia have Ginis in the low 30s, the US has over the past several decades developed inequalities usually found only in poor countries with autocratic governments.<\/p>\n

So what? Isn\u2019t inequality merely the price of America being No. 1?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s almost certainly false,\u201d Bowles tells SFR. \u201cPrior to about 20 years ago, most economists thought that inequality just greased the wheels of progress. Overwhelmingly now, people who study it empirically think that it\u2019s sand in the wheels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bowles can take some credit for that shift, but he hasn\u2019t won the battle. Many economists don\u2019t study things empirically\u2014that is, by looking at things in the real, physical world. Instead, they stay safely within the land of theory.<\/p>\n

Theoryland may be the only place the \u201cequality-efficiency trade-off\u201d really works. Just to prove it wrong, Bowles charts the concept on a whiteboard at SFI.<\/p>\n

The vertical axis is economic output. The horizontal axis is equality. The curve shows the theoretical trade-off. \u201cSo we\u2019re here\u201d\u2014point A, high on the curve\u2014\u201cand we want to go to point B because we\u2019re egalitarian. And [the theory says] that\u2019s kind of too bad because we\u2019re going to suffer the loss of income,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Bowles draws another dot inside the curve\u2014point C\u2014symbolically destroying the clean, simple world represented by the model. \u201cBasically, it assumes that the economy is already efficiently organized,\u201d Bowles explains. \u201cBut most economies are at point C. They have both more inequality and less income than they could have because they\u2019re inefficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fan club for Bowles\u2019 reality-based approach to economics includes Ona Porter, executive director of Community Action New Mexico. She first encountered his work while reading the Stanford Social Innovation Review. \u201cIt\u2019s really my job to be paying attention to what cutting-edge theory and practice is,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Among other projects, Community Action lobbies the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission on behalf of low-income residents, opposing rate increases by the Public Services Company of New Mexico. \u201cConstantly,\u201d Porter says, \u201cit\u2019s our voice against the suits.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her on-the-ground experience supports a message Bowles has pushed all these years in academia.<\/p>\n

\u201cInequality,\u201d she says, \u201creally holds us back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bowles offers a key reason why this is so. \u201cInequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.<\/p>\n

Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls \u201cguard labor.\u201d In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.<\/p>\n

The job descriptions of guard labor range from \u201cimposing work discipline\u201d\u2014think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online\u2014to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.<\/p>\n

The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.<\/p>\n

The problem, Bowles argues, is that too much guard labor sustains \u201cillegitimate inequalities,\u201d creating a drag on the economy. All of the people in guard labor jobs could be doing something more productive with their time\u2014perhaps starting their own businesses or helping to reduce the US trade deficit with China.<\/p>\n

Guard labor supports what one might call the beat-down economy. Community Action\u2019s Porter sees it all the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have based almost everything we have done on the idea that we always need a part of our workforce that is marginalized\u2014that we can call this group into action at any time, pay them nothing and they will do anything that needs to be done,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

More discouraging, perhaps, is the statistical fact that a person born into this workforce has little chance of rising beyond it.<\/p>\n

Again with the numbers:<\/p>\n

30<\/p>\n

32<\/p>\n

The first number is the likelihood, expressed as a percentage, that a child born to parents whose incomes fall within the top 10 percent of Americans will grow up to be at least as wealthy.<\/p>\n

The second is the percentage likelihood that a person born into the bottom 10 percent of society will stay at the bottom.<\/p>\n

Just to drive the point home, here\u2019s a third number: 1.3<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the percentage likelihood that a bottom 10 percenter will ever make it to the top 10 percent. For 99 out of 100 people, rags never lead to riches.<\/p>\n

These estimates come from research by one of Bowles\u2019 former students, American University economist Tom Hertz, published in Unequal Chances, a 2004 book co-edited by Bowles. To arrive at these figures, Hertz mined the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a survey of 4,800 American families that\u2019s been updated each year since it began in 1968, the year Martin Luther King inspired Bowles to study inequality.<\/p>\n

It may not come as a shock that rich kids who grow up learning to sail eventually buy yachts, while the offspring of burger-flippers might hope to rise to be the night managers for whole crews of burger-flippers. What\u2019s troubling about this research is that poverty tends to persist through generations, no matter how individuals try to improve their circumstances.<\/p>\n

So, much of what Americans tell their children is wrong. It doesn\u2019t really matter how long you go to school or even necessarily how hard you work. The single most important factor to success in America is \u201cone\u2019s choice of parents,\u201d as a contributor to Unequal Chances wryly put it.<\/p>\n

What about natural intelligence? \u201cThe problem with IQ is that it\u2019s just not very important in determining who\u2019s rich and who\u2019s poor. And most people don\u2019t believe that,\u201d Bowles says.<\/p>\n

What about education?<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing willing to sit in a boring classroom for 12 years, and then sign up for four more years and then sign up for three or more years after that\u2014well, that\u2019s a pretty good measure of your willingness to essentially do what you\u2019re told,\u201d Bowles says.<\/p>\n

This bodes ill for the American Dream of upward mobility. It also puts the lie to a can-do clich\u00e9 underpinning much US economic policy: namely, that people in need should get a \u201chand up\u201d rather than a \u201chand out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The economic rationale for putting a cap on unemployment benefits and severely restricting welfare, even for the poorest Americans, is that people won\u2019t look for work if the government is too generous.<\/p>\n

If Bowles is right, however, the answer is more handouts, not less.<\/p>\n

More importantly: handouts for whom?<\/p>\n

$21,200<\/p>\n

$24,500<\/p>\n

The first number is the annual unemployment benefit (before taxes) that can be claimed by an average New Mexico wage earner.<\/p>\n

The second number is the minimum in state subsidies \u201cgreen\u201d manufacturing company C\/D\u00b2 Enterprises will receive for each employee it hires at its new plant in McKinley County. Most of the jobs will go to Navajo tribal members.<\/p>\n

The first number represents a modest government grant to individuals on the condition that they keep looking for a wage-paying job.<\/p>\n

The second represents a taxpayer-funded subsidy that virtually guarantees the owners of C\/D\u00b2 will make a profit.<\/p>\n

Gov. Richardson and Economic Development Secretary Fred Mondrag\u00f3n announced the C\/D\u00b2 project on Jan. 21, at a press conference that did not lack for horn-tooting.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy notes say your pro-business attitude makes my job a little easier,\u201d Mondrag\u00f3n said to the governor. \u201cIt makes it a lot easier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richardson drove the point home with a message to state lawmakers, who\u2014budget deficit in the hundreds of millions of dollars\u2014are weighing higher taxes against program cuts.<\/p>\n

The message? Don\u2019t cut spending on incentives that attract out-of-state corporations\u2014\u201clike the high-wage tax credit, like the job training tax incentives, like the capital gains [tax cut], like the personal income tax [cut],\u201d Richardson said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are working. They\u2019re bringing jobs. Let\u2019s not mess with these.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sure, Richardson\u2019s policies have created some jobs. But the facts suggest a strategy focused on attracting businesses simply cannot cope with the recession.<\/p>\n

In exchange for untold hundreds of thousands in tax incentives, C\/D\u00b2 hopes to hire 40 employees within three years. There are 2,300 unemployed people\u2014at least\u2014in McKinley County.<\/p>\n

Their benefits will eventually run out. Then what? With credit still hard to come by, it\u2019s unlikely they\u2019ll start their own businesses. The frightening prospect of ever-deepening poverty means that unemployment is actually quite useful to corporations like C\/D\u00b2: The fear creates what Bowles calls \u201clabor discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Economic Development Department\u2019s annual report provides no clear accounting of how much the state spent to fulfill the department\u2019s mission of job creation. It only provides a table of results. Even by its own yardstick, the department fell short with its key employment effort, the Job Training Incentive Program.<\/p>\n

Last year, the EDD report says, that program \u201cassisted\u201d in the \u201ccreation\u201d of 4,570 jobs statewide (though the definitions are fuzzy) [News, July 22, 2009: \u201cIncentive Dis\u201d]. That\u2019s well short of the department\u2019s 6,000-job goal.<\/p>\n

Even if EDD had met its goal, its efforts would\u2019ve paled next to the 25,900 existing jobs that disappeared last year across the state, according to the Department of Workforce Solutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the job growth in the state is unrelated to these economic development programs,\u201d Legislative Finance Committee Chief Economist Tom Clifford says. \u201cThey say, \u2018Well, these jobs with this company wouldn\u2019t have come here without the incentive.\u2019 That\u2019s often overstated, in my view.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be fair, JTIP does succeed in one regard: It pads corporate balance sheets by an average of $10.5 million a year, by shifting the cost of workers\u2019 wages from employers to taxpayers.<\/p>\n

If Bowles has the history of wealth figured out all the way back to the Stone Age, shouldn\u2019t he have some practical advice?<\/p>\n

Indeed he does. Here, one number will suffice.<\/p>\n

$250,000.<\/p>\n

OK, that\u2019s a figure Bowles picked out of the air. It\u2019s how much each person might receive under a key economic reform he supports: universal welfare.<\/p>\n

It could also be called direct government investment in everyone. After all, taxpayers already invest in strangers\u2019 children through the public schools before turning them loose with nothing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuppose instead what we did is this: We said, \u2018Look, when somebody turns 18, he gets a quarter of a million dollars and, after that, you\u2019re on your own,\u2019\u201d Bowles says. \u201cOnce you\u2019ve got your quarter-million, you\u2019ve got to make a decision: \u2018Should I go to college or do I want to start a business?\u2019\u2014which you could do with a quarter of a million.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a variant of an old idea, more recently popularized\u2014at least in Europe\u2014by the Belgian economist Philippe Van Parijs. Under his \u201cbasic income grant\u201d proposal, the government would redistribute wealth so that everyone has enough to live.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey just get a check. And they get it no matter what\u2014Rockefeller, the poorest person in America, everybody gets it,\u201d Bowles says. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing you can do to get more; there\u2019s nothing you can do to get less.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a system eliminates the disincentives to work in the current social safety net. \u201cThe problem with the welfare system is that as soon as you get a job, they start taking your money,\u201d Bowles says. \u201cThis basically says, \u2018You\u2019ve got this nest egg and, if you go out and get a job, you keep the whole thing\u2014except for whatever taxes you pay.\u201d<\/p>\n

Can you hear the Friedmanites groaning? \u201cIt sounds very radical,\u201d Bowles says, \u201cbut it\u2019s very consistent with economic ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

It makes as least as much sense as giving hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street\u2019s largest banks\u2014some of which helped cause the recession\u2014so that the banks can lend it back to taxpayers at outrageous interest rates.<\/p>\n

Bowles\u2019 suggestions\u2014radical yet oddly conservative\u2014also mesh well with his general approach to economics. The SFI professor isn\u2019t as easy to pigeonhole or dismiss as other lefties who believe the assumptions of mainstream economics\u2014for instance, that people behave rationally\u2014are bogus.<\/p>\n

\u201cSam Bowles is somebody who straddles the boundary. He maintains the idea that there should be radical redistribution\u2014that the current system is a terrible system in a variety of ways\u2014but he\u2019s also somebody who believes the methodological tools of economics have some real value,\u201d GWU\u2019s Farrell says. \u201cI think what he\u2019s doing is very smart. And it actually has some promise for a future, coherent research agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also promise in some Bowlesian projects that are already underway.<\/p>\n

For instance, in the past few years, Community Action New Mexico has helped approximately 800 New Mexicans set up \u201cindividual development accounts\u201d\u2014basically savings accounts on steroids. After completing a financial-ed class, IDA holders eventually have their savings matched 4-to-1, giving them a start toward buying a home, paying tuition or starting a business.<\/p>\n

Community Action\u2019s Porter calls it economic development \u201cthat works for the individual as well.\u201d The IDAs, she says, have led to 93 new businesses and 67 home purchases, and have sent 110 people to college.<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s investment so far has totaled approximately $2,500 per IDA. If you divide New Mexico\u2019s contribution by the number of jobs created by homegrown, IDA-supported businesses, Community Action\u2019s approach is approximately $10,000 cheaper per job than the corporate subsidies Richardson supports.<\/p>\n

The IDAs aren\u2019t ideal. Not everyone qualifies. And what if somebody starts a business that fails, buys a home that falls in value or decides to study a vanishing trade (say, journalism)?<\/p>\n

This is where Bowles has yet to be heard.<\/p>\n

Liberals tend to think of inequality as a matter of class and race\u2014and that\u2019s true, he says. But individual success hinges on a big X factor: \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of luck involved,\u201d Bowles says.<\/p>\n

No politician\u2019s promise can remove that element of unpredictability. Which means the smart policy, in Bowles\u2019 view, is for the government to care for people who suffer misfortune through no fault of their own. This is social security in the small \u201cs\u201d sense\u2014an idea that was forgotten when the dominant Chicago School put thinkers like Bowles in exile.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole idea of social security,\u201d Bowles says, \u201cis to insure the unlucky by having the lucky pay a little extra.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three more numbers, none of them lucky:<\/p>\n

42<\/p>\n

38.8<\/p>\n

46.4<\/p>\n

The first is how many years have passed since Bowles was inspired by King to \u201cput his heart and his head together\u201d and study economic inequality.<\/p>\n

The second is the Gini measure of inequality for the US back then, a level comparable to other wealthy nations like Japan or Israel today.<\/p>\n

The third is the most recent US Gini, as calculated by the Census Bureau. It\u2019s at a level comparable to the Philippines, a former colony of islands where every other person lives on less than $2 a day, or Rwanda, an even poorer country in Central Africa that was home to a genocide 16 years ago\u2014a country whose name is often synonymous with hopelessness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Born Poor? by Corey Pein in the Sante Fe Reporter. The Text: Consider these two numbers. Don\u2019t worry, there won\u2019t be a quiz. The first number is 3,500. The second is 32. The first is how many jobs Santa Fe County lost in 2009, according to the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nInequality, Economic Growth, And The Capitalist State - Prose Before Hos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Article: Born Poor? by Corey Pein in the Sante Fe Reporter. The Text: Consider these two numbers. Don\u2019t worry, there won\u2019t be a quiz. 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