OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week — 2006
Many emotions were running through Chip Jenkins as he watched,
sometimes in tears, as firefighters doused the flames on the smoldering
ruins of Fort Clatsop late on the night of Oct 3, 2005.
But one of the strongest was determination.
“I knew we would be here – I knew we would rebuild the fort,” he
said Saturday as the new Fort Clatsop was dedicated. “I didn’t know
how, or how long it would take. But by 10 o’clock the next morning, it
was obvious we were going to follow the example of 1955.”
Almost 400 people turned out for Saturday’s ceremony celebrating
the completion of the new fort replica, built on the exact same spot as
the 50-year-old landmark destroyed by accidental fire last year.
On the waterfront at the edge of Astoria’s former China-
town, a tribute to Astoria’s Chinese heritage is taking shape.
A tiny park at Ninth and Astor streets will be transformed in
a way that commemorates the culture and contributions of
Chinese immigrants and celebrates their hard work, bravery
and pioneering spirit.
At the end of the Nov. 28 Warrenton City Commission meeting, City
Engineer/Public Works Director Alan Johansson lost his job and the
city’s engineering department was eliminated.
Prompted by public criticism, Commission members are having sec-
ond thoughts about the way they handled the issue, which was not on
the agenda that night.
“No time is a good time (to eliminate and employee’s position), but
our timing was less than ideal,” Commissioner Mark Kujala said at the
start of Tuesday’s regular meeting. “It was a surprise, but yet I agreed
to it. I could have asked to table it, but I chose not to,” he said. “I now
think that was a mistake..”
50 years ago — 1966
LETTERS TO SANTA
Dear Santa,
I would like to have a Golden
Treasure Chest of Games there
are 63 games for only $3.98.
Green Ghost Game $4.98.
Andy
P.S. Please come this year,
please. Get the stuff out of a Spie-
gel Christmas catalog 66.
Dear Santa Claus,
My name is Kay. I am six
years old. For Christmas I would
like Cheerful Tearful, and a Sew-
ing Machine. My sister Sharon
is writing this for me, because I
can’t write good yet. I have tried
to be a good girl.
There’s some variety in
vocational instruction at
Tongue Point. Here are
David Nigh, in front, and
Thomas Kelly Jr. working
Dear Santa,
on a Christmas tree weld-
My name is Ross. I am 3 years ed together from pipes and
old. For Christmas I would like a rods. It will adorn one of
toot-toot train and some puzzles. the dormitory areas.
My sister Sharon is writing this
for me because I can’t write yet. I am trying to be a good
boy.
75 years ago — 1941
Her hull broken in two by stormy seas, the ground steamer Mauna
Ala is fast digging a grave for her shattered bones in the surf off Clat-
sop beach. Early Sunday morning the hull “jack knifed,” with the bow
section heading for the beach and the stern remaining broadside to the
breakers. At high tide the stern is buried in white water except for a
quivering mast and cargo booms.
Cargo continues to wash ashore. Thousands of beachcombers
examined the debris on the sand for salvageable items. Cars crowded
the beach, many of them stalled in the sand for a time. Some salvag-
ers risked their trucks and cars by picking up salvage as it came in
with the surf. Warnings that cargo contained arsenic and caustic soda
appeared to be taken with a grain of salt.
A clipper-borne letter, written in Honolulu while the Jap-
anese were pounding the United States’ Hawaiian naval and
army bases a week ago Sunday was received here by Mrs.
Marian Sweet Saturday. The clipper which carried the letter
is believed to have been the same one which was under fire
of Japanese machine guns and landed in San Francisco with
16 bullet holes in the fuselage.
The uncensored missive was penned by the former Miss
Imola Mitchell of Astoria, who lived with Mrs. Sweet. She is
now Mrs. Imola Church, wife of Lieutenant Robert Church,
stationed in the Hawaiian islands, and she is employed in a
millinery store.
“We still can’t believe it, but we’re being bombed,” the
letter begins. “We even saw the Japanese planes, yet it
seemed like the war games we’ve been watching.”
“We had a ringside seat from our front yard. Peal Harbor
is all afire, as is Hickam field.”
Following precedent set in other coastal cities, the city commis-
sions of Astoria and Warrenton Monday night passed emergency ordi-
nances declaring it unlawful to violate blackout regulations estab-
lished by civil, military or naval authorities and gave the rulings teeth
by providing that violators are subject to fine and imprisonment, or
both.
The American dream,
quantified at long last
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times News Service
T
he phrase “American dream”
was invented during the
Great Depression. It comes
from a popular 1931 book by histo-
rian James Truslow
Adams, who
defined it as “that
dream of a land in
which life should
be better and richer
and fuller for
everyone.”
In the decades that followed,
the dream became a reality. Thanks
to rapid, widely shared economic
growth, nearly all children grew up
to achieve the most basic defini-
tion of a better life — earning more
money and enjoying higher living
standards than their parents had.
These days, people are arguably
more worried about the American
dream than at any point since the
Depression. But there has been no
real measure of it, despite all of the
data available. No one has known
how many Americans are more
affluent than their parents were —
and how the number has changed.
It’s a thorny research question,
because it requires tracking individ-
ual families over time rather than (as
most economic statistics do) taking
one-time snapshots of the country.
assuming that most of these children
had earned more than their parents
— but were surprised to learn that
nearly all of them had, said David
Grusky, one of the researchers, also
of Stanford. About 92 percent of
1940 babies had higher pretax infla-
tion-adjusted household earnings at
age 30 than their parents had at the
same age. (The results were sim-
ilar at older ages and for post-tax
earnings.)
The few 1940 children who
earned less than their parents were
also, for the most part, doing just
fine. They were generally earning
less because they had grown up rich
— children of top corporate execu-
tives, say, who became, or married,
doctors, lawyers or professors.
Achieving the American dream
was a virtual guarantee for this gen-
eration, regardless of whether peo-
ple went to college, got divorced
or suffered a layoff. Why? Because
they spent their prime working years
in an economy with two wonderful
features. It was growing rapidly, and
the bounty from its growth flowed
to the rich, the middle class and the
poor alike.
Not even the oldest baby boom-
ers, born in the late 1940s and early
1950s, would be quite so lucky.
Economic growth began to slow as
they were entering the job market
in the 1970s, thanks in part to the
energy crises.
Tax records
The beginnings of a break-
through came several years ago,
when a team of economists led by
Raj Chetty received access to mil-
lions of tax records that stretched
over decades. The records were
anonymous and came with strict pri-
vacy rules, but nonetheless allowed
for the linking of generations.
The resulting research is among
the most eye-opening economics
work in recent years. You’ve proba-
bly heard some of the findings even
if you don’t realize it. They have
shown that the odds of escaping
poverty vary widely by region, for
instance, an insight that has influ-
enced federal housing policy.
After the research began appear-
ing, I mentioned to Chetty, a Stan-
ford professor, and his colleagues
that I thought they had a chance to
do something no one yet had: cre-
ate an index of the American dream.
It took them months of work, using
old Census data to estimate long-
ago decades, but they have done it.
They’ve constructed a data set that
shows the percentage of U.S. chil-
dren who earn more money — and
less money — than their parents
earned at the same age.
Alarming
The index is deeply alarming.
It’s a portrait of an economy that
disappoints a huge number of peo-
ple who have heard that they live
in a country where life gets better,
only to experience something quite
different.
Their frustration helps explain
not only this year’s disturbing pres-
idential campaign but also Amer-
icans’ growing distrust of nearly
every major societal institution,
including the federal government,
corporate America, labor unions, the
news media and organized religion.
Yet the data also helps point the
way to some promising solutions.
It begins with children who were
born in 1940, less than a decade
after the publication of Adams’
book, “The Epic of America.” The
researchers went into the project
If the American
dream could
survive the
Depression,
and then
thrive in a way
few people
imagined, it
can survive
our current
troubles.
Globalization
In the 1980s, economic inequal-
ity began to rise, a result of glo-
balization, technological change,
government policies favoring the
well-off and a slowdown in edu-
cational attainment and the work-
force’s skill level. Together, these
forces pinched the incomes of the
middle class and the poor. The tech
boom of the 1990s helped — slow-
ing the decline of the American
dream — but only temporarily.
For babies born in 1980 —
today’s 36-year-olds — the index of
the American dream has fallen to 50
percent: Only half of them make as
much money as their parents did. In
the industrial Midwestern states that
effectively elected Donald Trump,
the share was once higher than the
national average. Now, it is a few
percentage points lower. There,
going backward is the norm.
Psychology research has shown
that people’s happiness is heav-
ily influenced by their relative sta-
tion in life. And it’s hard to imagine
a more salient comparison than to a
person’s own parents, particularly
at this time of year, when fami-
lies gather for rituals that have been
repeated for decades.
“You’re going home for the
holidays and you compare your
standard of living to your par-
ents,” Grusky, a sociologist, said.
“It’s one of the few ties you have
over the course of your entire life.
Friends come and go. Parents are a
constant.”
Revive the dream
How, then, can the country
revive Adams’ dream of a “better
and richer and fuller” life for every-
one? The solution has to involve
some combination of faster eco-
nomic growth and more widely
shared growth.
The bad news is that lifting GDP
growth is terribly difficult. Trump
has promised to do so, but offered
few specifics. If anything, he favors
some of the same policies (deregu-
lation and tax cuts) that have failed
in recent decades.
The better news — potentially
— is that lifting growth is the less
important half of the equation,
noted Nathaniel Hendren of Har-
vard, another of the researchers:
The rise of inequality has damaged
the American dream more than the
growth slowdown.
One way to think about inequal-
ity’s role is to remember that the
U.S. economy is far larger and
more productive than in 1980,
even if it isn’t growing as rapidly.
Per-capita GDP is almost twice as
high now. By itself, that increase
should allow most children to live
better than their parents.
They don’t, however, because
the fruits of growth have gone dis-
proportionately to the affluent.
The researchers ran a clever
simulation recreating the last sev-
eral decades with the same GDP
growth but without the post-1970
rise in inequality. When they did,
the share of 1980 babies who grew
up to out-earn their parents jumped
to 80 percent, from 50 percent. The
rise was considerably smaller (to
62 percent) in the simulation that
kept inequality constant but imag-
ined that growth returned to its old,
faster path.
“We need to have more equal
growth if we want to revive the
American dream,” Chetty said.
Given today’s high-tech, glo-
balized economy, the single best
step would be to help more middle-
and low-income children acquire
the skills that lead to good-paying
jobs. Notably, most college gradu-
ates still earn more than their par-
ents did, other data shows — yes,
even after taking into account stu-
dent debt.
But education is not the only
answer. Incomes have also stag-
nated because of the rise of cor-
porate power and the weakening
of labor unions, leading profits to
rise at the expense of wages. The
decline of two-parent families plays
a role, too. And tax policy has not
done enough to push back against
these forces: The middle class, not
the affluent, deserves a tax cut.
The painful irony of 2016 is that
nostalgia and anger over the fad-
ing American dream helped elect a
president who may put the dream
even further out of reach for many
people — taking away their health
insurance, supporting ineffective
school vouchers and showering
government largesse on the rich.
Every one of those issues will be
worth a fight.
If the American dream could
survive the Depression, and then
thrive in a way few people imag-
ined, it can survive our current
troubles.