Forum Post: America’s Exploding Pipe Dream, by Charles M. Blow of the NYTimes

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/blow-americas-exploding-pipe-dream.html?_r=1 "Poor policies and poor choices have led to exceedingly poor outcomes. Our societal chickens have come home to roost. This was underscored in a report released on Thursday by the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation of Germany entitled “Social Justice in the OECD — How Do the Member States Compare?” It analyzed some metrics of basic fairness and equality among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and ranked America among the ones at the bottom. I could write (and have written) ad nauseam about our woeful state, but it might be more powerful to see it for yourself. So here are some of the sad data from the report. "

See the chart here: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/10/29/opinion/29blow-ch.html?ref=opinion

One comment there suggests OWS have a big copy of that chart up in Liberty Plaza.

The chart echoes stuff written about in 2007 in relation to a UN report on childhood in different industrialized countries: http://web.archive.org/web/20071019031111/http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Generation_Fcked_How_Britain_is_Eating_Its_Young.html "“The reason our children’s lives [in the UK] are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA,” he said. “So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.” "

Solutions: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshstart.html "The failures of the American left are not in its egalitarian values, but in the means it uses to realize those values. This document suggests the strategies the left could follow in the United States if it took the findings of the social sciences more seriously than it currently does. ..."