Jim Tankersley – NationalJournal.com<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe middle class incubates entrepreneurs because it offers a good combination of time, resources, and motivation to invest in skills and climb the innovation ladder. Put it this way: The comforts that flowed from the Pacific Coast Feather Co., his then-modest family business, provided Nick Hanauer with a house full of books and days full of time to explore big ideas. Think of those comforts as an investment. The eventual return was Hanauer\u2019s venture-capital portfolio. Poor families just scraping by at the margins can\u2019t make those investments, so their children struggle to achieve in school and pursue higher education. Children from rich families may, thanks to their extreme childhood comforts, lack the desire to build wealth and climb the economic ladder, which the Kauffman study found to be a key motivation for would-be entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n
The economy sags when kids who could have grown up to be physicists end up spending their lives brewing lattes at Starbucks. Or when a young woman born to be a teacher finds herself babysitting, for peanuts, while she waits for a classroom to open up.<\/p>\n
Courtney Carbone, wrapped in a scarf and a nervous smile on a cool spring morning, is a transplant to the Northwest. She grew up in northwestern Connecticut, daughter of a carpentry teacher and a waitress who went on to teach preschool. Her parents were not so different from Nick Hanauer\u2019s, actually.From the age of 9, Carbone knew what she wanted to do with her life. She was bright and rebellious. At the prep school she attended on loans that her parents took out, she routinely skipped classes when she didn\u2019t respect the teacher\u2019s effort. \u201cThat just made me want to be a teacher even more,\u201d Carbone says. \u201cI wanted to be the one who made students want to show up.\u201d<\/p>\n
She got her wish after graduate school, landing a job teaching English at a Connecticut prep school. That was 2006. In 2009, the recession brought budget cuts crashing down on her school, and she lost her job. She drifted West in her teal 1997 Nissan Altima to live with a friend and look for a teaching job in Seattle.<\/p>\n
She is still looking. Last year, she attended a regional job fair in Northern California, which she compared to speed dating. She got several interviews. No callbacks.<\/p>\n
Carbone has nannied and babysat. She has applied for teaching jobs up and down the West Coast. She taught two composition classes at a community college for 11 weeks. She suffered from depression, lost her sense of identity, saw her relationship with her boyfriend dissolve. She moved briefly to Utah last winter to work in a child-care center at a ski resort, earning a season lift pass and less than $10 an hour. Now, back in Seattle, she is caring for a friend\u2019s two special-needs children, for $15 an hour, in cash.<\/p>\n
Carbone happens to be looking for a teaching job at the worst possible time. Washington state has shed 6,500 local education positions since 2009, due to budget cuts. \u201cI know that every time I apply for a job, I\u2019m one of hundreds of people,\u201d she says. \u201cBut at the same time, knowing something and feeling something are different things. After a while [not getting a job] starts to eat away at your soul.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carbone isn\u2019t spending money, isn\u2019t feeding that great middle-class consumption engine of growth. She\u2019s paying a very small amount in sales taxes, which largely fund the state\u2019s road-building and school budgets. She\u2019s not doing her part to support the institutions that help stabilize growth.<\/p>\n
\u201cI keep selling things and getting rid of stuff,\u201d Carbone says. \u201cIt\u2019s freeing, in a way. But I do keep dreaming of the apartment I had when I was a teacher, full of plants and beautiful things that were mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carbone\u2019s struggles aren\u2019t rare, even in one of America\u2019s most innovative cities. Seattle hides its erosion better than a lot of other places, away from the rain-soaked microbrew pubs and the towering new Amazon buildings near downtown. \u201cThis feels idyllic,\u201d says Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Washington. \u201cSeattle doesn\u2019t seem like a place I\u2019d worry about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Except, he does. State forecasters expect no net middle-class job growth in the next decade,\u00a0The Seattle Times<\/em>\u00a0recently reported. The state Supreme Court has declared that Washington\u2019s schools are failing their constitutional mandate to educate all children adequately. Tuition at Rosenfeld\u2019s university now runs 20 percent of a median family income, up from 6 percent two decades ago. The Seattle-based real-estate data firm Zillow reports that middle- and lower-tier homes in the metro area lost an average of 38 percent of their value in the housing collapse, compared with 29 percent for top-tier homes.<\/p>\nELEVATOR DOWN<\/h2>\n
Here, and across the country, the economy is suffering because people cannot fulfill their potential. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford University published a paper this spring arguing that up to one-fifth of America\u2019s wage growth over the past 50 years can be attributed to the knocking down of social barriers that prevented women and minorities from doing their best\u2014clearing the way for waitresses to become lawyers, or African-American orderlies to become doctors.<\/p>\n
Now, the reverse appears to be happening. Workers who once produced $100,000 a year of manufactured goods have been forced downward into jobs flipping $20,000 worth of burgers. Carbone, who once produced $40,000 in education services, now tends toddlers for half that value. That\u2019s an economy-wide output loss. If the slide continues, \u201cgrowth would go down, no question,\u201d says Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economist at Chicago\u2019s Booth School of Business who was the study\u2019s lead author.<\/p>\n
SOURCE:<\/strong>\u00a0The 1 Percent Solution – Jim Tankersley – NationalJournal.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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