Zeno Swijtink
12-07-2009, 10:03 PM
Trends That Will Affect Your Future… The Vanishing Middle Class (https://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2809%2900294-8/fulltext)
Stephan A. Schwartz
The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE, it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.
After the American Revolution intellectuals, working from drawing rooms on both sides of the Atlantic, thought the colonies would eventually replicate Britain's power structure based on large land ownership and an entrenched leadership class. There was more land than anyone in Europe had ever seen and, amongst the leadership, Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Madison and a host of other founders lived the country life. Even city rich such as Robert Morris owned and speculated in land. Benjamin Franklin, however, although often involved in land schemes, did not think the British agrarian model—even in its more noble Jeffersonian variant—would prevail. The reason he did not was because his life had been very different from the other founders. They all were country gentry or urban upper middle class professionals. He was a working class “leather apron man” in the slang of his day, was proud of it, and never concealed his roots, no matter the circumstances.
It wasn't personal experience alone, however, that guided Franklin in his vision of the newly minted United States. He appraised with a demographer's eye and calculated that the American population and economy within a century would exceed that of Britain. Almost 50 years before Thomas Malthus wrote his famous An Essay on Principle of Population1 in 1798, Franklin had written Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.2 What he saw when he looked around him was a rapidly growing population of immigrants aspiring to become middle class. “No man continues long a labourer for others,” wrote Franklin as he considered the vast tracts of the frontier, “but gets a plantation of his own?… . No man continues long a journeyman to a trade,” he said, thinking of the thriving shops he had known, “but goes … and sets up for himself.”2 He was right. In 1775, the skilled working class, “artificers” as they were then called, represented about three of 10 people in the Boston population, which was about 10,000.3, 4 The tax rolls of 1772 show not quite half the Philadelphia population of nearly 25,000 listed in the same category.4 It was a class structure very different from Europe, where a bloated and corrupt aristocracy was supported in the cities and countryside by the mass of people, many of whom lived in appalling poverty.5
Franklin wanted the United States to be a democratic republic whose political power flowed from its middle class. And he saw this middle class as entrepreneurial, family centered, upwardly mobile, and technologically sophisticated. To build such a society, he worked throughout his life with three simple practical steps: the creation of “virtuous” citizens, the formation of small groups with a common purpose and commitment to the collective good, and the establishment of networks that grew from the connecting of these groups. “I have always thought,” he once wrote a friend, “that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan and … makes the execution of that same plan his sole study.”6
Franklin's view of America prevailed, and by the early decades of the last century we became the technologically sophisticated upwardly mobile middle class nation he had envisioned. Almost everyone reading this, who grew up in the United States from the 1930s on, has lived in the world Franklin envisioned. It is the only world many of us have ever known. But it does not follow that this is the way the world must be. Legions of immigrants from ruined countries attest to this. We can grasp the possibility of a deteriorating society when it comes from the developing world. But it is much harder to see it in our own homeland. Yet there are many signs suggesting that trends leading to such outcomes are potently present in our own country. Let me just touch on a few of the major examples to be found glaring out at us from reliable data. I'll start with the disparity between the wealthy and the rest of American society.
University of California, Berkeley, economist Emanuel Saez reports that, in 2007, the disparity between the richest and the poorest reached a level never before seen, going all the way back to 1917 when modern tax data began to be collected.7 According to Saez's study, the top 10% of earners in America now receive 49.7% of all the income earned in the United States. To give you, the reader, a sense of proportion during most of the 1970s, the top 10% earned around 33% of all the income earned in the United States.
This contrast becomes even starker when only the super rich are considered. According to Saez, “The top 0.01 percent of earners in the US are now taking home six percent of all the income, higher than the 1920s peak of five percent, and a whopping six-fold increase since the start of the Reagan administration, when the top 0.01 percent earned one percent of all the income.”7
Table 1 lists the publicly reported compensation of the top 10 CEOs in the country. These numbers are quite literally incomprehensible to most of us. Physicians are a relatively well-paid group, at the high end of the middle class (Figure 1).
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/ImagesforMembers/physicians.png
https://www.sonoma.edu/users/s/swijtink/other/highest.png
The numbers in Table 1 and Figure 1 are not the same realities—Stephen Schwarzman made 4,680 times more than your average $150,000-a-year primary care doc, who routinely makes life-altering decisions concerning his patients. The super rich may have the same family problems, drug issues, and the like as others, but they experience those things in a world apart. Paying your kid's education tab or making the mortgage are not concerns that occupy the rich.
This is not a criticism of profit, or a screed against profit making. History is pretty clear that profit is a critical factor in social success. I am describing a different trend, the one in which profit making trumps all other considerations. This trend is the one leading to civil breakdown. History has also shown repeatedly that when the difference between rich and poor becomes too great, particularly when the middle class is destroyed, a point is reached where a large portion of the population no longer feels they have an investment in social stability. When this comes to incorporate educated entrepreneurially inclined men and women, it is at this point that movements advocating social unrest gain followers, and the fabric of society breaks down.
But, it isn't just that the rich have become fabulously richer. If that were all there was to it, it would be little more than a curiosity. When everyone in a profit-oriented society is doing well, those doing best seem admirable. You could be one too—at least in fantasy. But that is not what is happening. We don't have a rich class that is 10 times as well off as the top of the middle class—or even 20 or 30, or 50 times—we have a rich class that on average is a hundred or more times beyond the means of even the most affluent middle class, and thousands of times more highly compensated than the poor. When this happens, the rich and the middle class have fewer and fewer common interests.
At the same time that this vast wealth aggregation has been occurring, the structure underpinning the middle class has, like so many of our bridges, decayed to a point of becoming dangerous. By 2006, according to the Brookings Institution, the portion of New York population considered middle class had shrunk to “only 16% of the city's families … That is, just one in six earned an income that came within 20% of the city's median, or typical, family income in 2000 (about $42,000)—one of the lowest rates in the nation.”9 New York may be an extreme case because it is an expensive city in which to live, but these same trends can be seen in many other American cities. This matters because our cities, where the middle class flourishes most easily, are all too often in decline. Cities are the nursery of the middle class. It is very hard to rise from poor to middle class in small towns and rural areas. There just aren't enough opportunities. We have allowed our cities to deteriorate with little thought to their role in generating succeeding waves of the middle class.
And, just as it follows that if your schools are bad your people will be ignorant—if the conditions to create new middle class men and women are not present, they will not come into being.
Across America cities are shrinking. Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, Dayton Buffalo, Chicago—which once comprised the spine of the American economy, made strong through manufacturing—are dying. Forbes reports, “So far this decade, 115,000 people have left Cleveland, for other climes. Nearly 30,000 people have left Youngstown, Ohio, and they aren't being replaced by either new babies or new immigrants.”10
This is not to argue that people should have to stay in cities. But it is an argument for understanding what creates the middle class, acknowledging that the middle class is critical to the success of the United States—and truthfully, in my view, the world—and fostering programs that create the engendering of a healthy middle class.
As badly as outsourcing and the end of manufacturing has affected the middle class, however, worse yet is the crippling burden of the illness-profit industry. As I write this, the United States is engaged in an insane debate over healthcare. The argument today is over “death panels” where they “pull the plug on grandma.” Politicians who, a few years ago, voted for exactly the same quite sensible end-of-life government-funded counseling now compare this with the Soviet Union. We have people dependent on Medicare screaming against socialist government medical programs. The whole debate has become surreal and absurd.
Today the Obama Administration let it be known that the “public option” (the government run option) that was the central promise of the campaign is now in jeopardy. The New York Times reported, “The White House, facing increasing skepticism over President Obama's call for a public insurance plan to compete with the private sector, signaled Sunday that it was willing to compromise and would consider a proposal for a nonprofit health cooperative being developed in the Senate.”11
By the time this is published the vote that will determine our fate will most probably have been taken. Depending on how it goes, its effects on the middle class may be catastrophic. Here's why:
The U.S. Census Bureau reports 18% of the American population under the age of 65 was without health insurance in 2007, their latest data available—that's almost 46 million Americans.12 As I reported in my last essay,13 in a rare conjoining of interests, researchers from both Harvard University's law and medical schools and Ohio University recently reported that 60% of all bankruptcies in 2007 arose from medical bills and the debt they created, often in middle-class insured families, and not just in the unemployed and/or uninsured as one might be tempted to think.
The researchers noted further that this trend was precipitous and negative, increasing 50% just between 2001 and 2007. Today people much like yourself are 2.38 times more likely to face a medical crisis with profound financial consequences.14 That's the conservative view.
According to the National Coalition on Health Care, “The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) estimated that the percentage of uninsured Americans under age 65 represented 27 percent of the population. According to the MEPS data, nearly 54 million Americans under the age of 65 were uninsured in the first half of 2007. Furthermore,
A recent study shows that based on the effects of the recession alone (not job loss), it is projected that nearly seven (7) million Americans will lose their health insurance coverage between 2008 and 2010. Urban Institute researchers estimate that if unemployment reaches 10 percent, another six (6) million Americans will lose their health insurance coverage. Taking these numbers together, it is conceivable that by next year, 57 to 60 million Americans will be uninsured.15
If we have allowed a small but vocal and violent minority to derail national healthcare, with a public option, the effects will extend far beyond the medical. If we haven't substantially changed the illness-profit industry into a real healthcare system, it is projected that between now and 2010 at least seven million more Americans will lose their health insurance.16 Many will fall out of the middle class.
Why does the middle class matter so much to America's health as a nation? Because the middle class, as a group, hold their positions as a result of their own efforts. Their affluence is not dependent on inherited wealth or special deals. Attaining what they have has given them a confidence neither the rich nor the poor can match, as well as a capacity to be flexible and supple. There is a direct correlation, in a global world, between the capacity to innovate and to persevere in the face of adverse immediate conditions and social health. To be deficient in either quality places a nation in peril. The middle class represents the portion of the population that fulfills this need best. The poor all too often are too beaten down and depressed to innovate, and the rich most frequently lack the impetus to do so.
These problems have a political dimension to be sure and certainly have political solutions. But this should not be seen as a partisan issue. Whether one is a Democrat or a Republican, it is incumbent on us as a nation to reverse this destruction of the middle class if we are to deal with what the 21st century holds for us.
References
1. Malthus T. An essay on principle of population. (1766–1834) Mineola, NY: Dover Publications; 2007;.
2. Franklin B. Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.. Writings. Vol III. pp. 63-73 https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ny8b1ij62D8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA215&dq=Observations+concerning+the+Increase+of+Mankind&ots=DKnwE4XGh2&sig=wKE63QSkedPtAEdF2jfL6GqOKYA#v=onepage&q=&f=fasleAccessed August 4, 2009.
3. Nash GB. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. 1979;Cambridge, Mass: 390-391.
4. Thayer T. Town into city, 1746-1765. In: Weigley RF editors. Philadelphia—A 300-Year History. New York, NY: Norton; 1982;p. 79.
5. Hawke D. The Colonial Experience. New York, NY: Babbs-Merrill; 1966;68-77.
6. In: Eliot CW editors. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New York, NY: P. F. Collier & Son Co; 1909;https://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=Fra2Aut&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive/eng-parsed&tag=publicAccessed August 9, 2009.
7. Tencer D. Concentration of wealth in hands of rich greatest on record. The Raw Story. August 15, 2009. Raw Story (https://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/15/concentration-of-wealth-in-hands-of-rich/Accessed) August 15, 2009.
8. Goldman D. The top 10 highest paid CEOs are … CNN/Money. August 14, 2009. https://money.cnn.com/2009/08/14/news/companies/highest_paid_ceos/Accessed August 14, 2009.
9. Berube A. The middle class is missing (New York) (Brookings. July 08, 2006). https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2006/0708metropolitanpolicy_berube.aspxAccessed August 7, 2009.
10. Zumbrun J. America's fastest-dying cities. Forbes. August 5, 2008. America's Fastest-Dying Cities - Forbes.com (https://www.forbes.com/2008/08/04/economy-ohio-michigan-biz_cx_jz_0805dying.htmlAccessed) August 7, 2009.
11. Stolberg SG. ‘Public option’ in health plan may be dropped (The New York Times. August 16, 2009). https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/health/policy/17talkshows.html?hpAccessed August 16, 2009.
12. DeNavas W, Proctor CB, Smith J. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census; 2008;.
13. Schwartz S. The illness profit industry and national security. Explore (NY). 2009;5:197–199. Abstract | Full Text | Full-Text PDF (149 KB) | CrossRef
14. Chu MC, Rhoades JA. The Uninsured in America, 1996-2007: Estimates for the U.S. Civilian Noninstitutionalized Population under Age 65. Rockville, Md: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; 2008;Statistical Brief 214.
15. Health Insurance Coverage. National Coalition on Health Care. https://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtmlAccessed August 9, 2009.
16. Gilmer TP, Kronick RG. Hard times and health insurance: how many Americans will be uninsured by 2010? Health Aff. Web Exclusive, May 28, 2009.
Stephan A. Schwartz is the editor of the daily Web publication The SchwartzReport (The Schwartz Report (https://www.schwartzreport.net)), which concentrates on trends that will shape the future, an area of research he has been working in since the mid-1960s. For over 35 years he has also been an active experimentalist doing research on the nature of consciousness, particularly remote viewing, healing, creativity, religious ecstasy, and meditation. He is the author of several books and numerous papers, technical reports, and general audience articles on these topics.
Stephan A. Schwartz
The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE, it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.
After the American Revolution intellectuals, working from drawing rooms on both sides of the Atlantic, thought the colonies would eventually replicate Britain's power structure based on large land ownership and an entrenched leadership class. There was more land than anyone in Europe had ever seen and, amongst the leadership, Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Madison and a host of other founders lived the country life. Even city rich such as Robert Morris owned and speculated in land. Benjamin Franklin, however, although often involved in land schemes, did not think the British agrarian model—even in its more noble Jeffersonian variant—would prevail. The reason he did not was because his life had been very different from the other founders. They all were country gentry or urban upper middle class professionals. He was a working class “leather apron man” in the slang of his day, was proud of it, and never concealed his roots, no matter the circumstances.
It wasn't personal experience alone, however, that guided Franklin in his vision of the newly minted United States. He appraised with a demographer's eye and calculated that the American population and economy within a century would exceed that of Britain. Almost 50 years before Thomas Malthus wrote his famous An Essay on Principle of Population1 in 1798, Franklin had written Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.2 What he saw when he looked around him was a rapidly growing population of immigrants aspiring to become middle class. “No man continues long a labourer for others,” wrote Franklin as he considered the vast tracts of the frontier, “but gets a plantation of his own?… . No man continues long a journeyman to a trade,” he said, thinking of the thriving shops he had known, “but goes … and sets up for himself.”2 He was right. In 1775, the skilled working class, “artificers” as they were then called, represented about three of 10 people in the Boston population, which was about 10,000.3, 4 The tax rolls of 1772 show not quite half the Philadelphia population of nearly 25,000 listed in the same category.4 It was a class structure very different from Europe, where a bloated and corrupt aristocracy was supported in the cities and countryside by the mass of people, many of whom lived in appalling poverty.5
Franklin wanted the United States to be a democratic republic whose political power flowed from its middle class. And he saw this middle class as entrepreneurial, family centered, upwardly mobile, and technologically sophisticated. To build such a society, he worked throughout his life with three simple practical steps: the creation of “virtuous” citizens, the formation of small groups with a common purpose and commitment to the collective good, and the establishment of networks that grew from the connecting of these groups. “I have always thought,” he once wrote a friend, “that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan and … makes the execution of that same plan his sole study.”6
Franklin's view of America prevailed, and by the early decades of the last century we became the technologically sophisticated upwardly mobile middle class nation he had envisioned. Almost everyone reading this, who grew up in the United States from the 1930s on, has lived in the world Franklin envisioned. It is the only world many of us have ever known. But it does not follow that this is the way the world must be. Legions of immigrants from ruined countries attest to this. We can grasp the possibility of a deteriorating society when it comes from the developing world. But it is much harder to see it in our own homeland. Yet there are many signs suggesting that trends leading to such outcomes are potently present in our own country. Let me just touch on a few of the major examples to be found glaring out at us from reliable data. I'll start with the disparity between the wealthy and the rest of American society.
University of California, Berkeley, economist Emanuel Saez reports that, in 2007, the disparity between the richest and the poorest reached a level never before seen, going all the way back to 1917 when modern tax data began to be collected.7 According to Saez's study, the top 10% of earners in America now receive 49.7% of all the income earned in the United States. To give you, the reader, a sense of proportion during most of the 1970s, the top 10% earned around 33% of all the income earned in the United States.
This contrast becomes even starker when only the super rich are considered. According to Saez, “The top 0.01 percent of earners in the US are now taking home six percent of all the income, higher than the 1920s peak of five percent, and a whopping six-fold increase since the start of the Reagan administration, when the top 0.01 percent earned one percent of all the income.”7
Table 1 lists the publicly reported compensation of the top 10 CEOs in the country. These numbers are quite literally incomprehensible to most of us. Physicians are a relatively well-paid group, at the high end of the middle class (Figure 1).
https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccobb/ImagesforMembers/physicians.png
https://www.sonoma.edu/users/s/swijtink/other/highest.png
The numbers in Table 1 and Figure 1 are not the same realities—Stephen Schwarzman made 4,680 times more than your average $150,000-a-year primary care doc, who routinely makes life-altering decisions concerning his patients. The super rich may have the same family problems, drug issues, and the like as others, but they experience those things in a world apart. Paying your kid's education tab or making the mortgage are not concerns that occupy the rich.
This is not a criticism of profit, or a screed against profit making. History is pretty clear that profit is a critical factor in social success. I am describing a different trend, the one in which profit making trumps all other considerations. This trend is the one leading to civil breakdown. History has also shown repeatedly that when the difference between rich and poor becomes too great, particularly when the middle class is destroyed, a point is reached where a large portion of the population no longer feels they have an investment in social stability. When this comes to incorporate educated entrepreneurially inclined men and women, it is at this point that movements advocating social unrest gain followers, and the fabric of society breaks down.
But, it isn't just that the rich have become fabulously richer. If that were all there was to it, it would be little more than a curiosity. When everyone in a profit-oriented society is doing well, those doing best seem admirable. You could be one too—at least in fantasy. But that is not what is happening. We don't have a rich class that is 10 times as well off as the top of the middle class—or even 20 or 30, or 50 times—we have a rich class that on average is a hundred or more times beyond the means of even the most affluent middle class, and thousands of times more highly compensated than the poor. When this happens, the rich and the middle class have fewer and fewer common interests.
At the same time that this vast wealth aggregation has been occurring, the structure underpinning the middle class has, like so many of our bridges, decayed to a point of becoming dangerous. By 2006, according to the Brookings Institution, the portion of New York population considered middle class had shrunk to “only 16% of the city's families … That is, just one in six earned an income that came within 20% of the city's median, or typical, family income in 2000 (about $42,000)—one of the lowest rates in the nation.”9 New York may be an extreme case because it is an expensive city in which to live, but these same trends can be seen in many other American cities. This matters because our cities, where the middle class flourishes most easily, are all too often in decline. Cities are the nursery of the middle class. It is very hard to rise from poor to middle class in small towns and rural areas. There just aren't enough opportunities. We have allowed our cities to deteriorate with little thought to their role in generating succeeding waves of the middle class.
And, just as it follows that if your schools are bad your people will be ignorant—if the conditions to create new middle class men and women are not present, they will not come into being.
Across America cities are shrinking. Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, Dayton Buffalo, Chicago—which once comprised the spine of the American economy, made strong through manufacturing—are dying. Forbes reports, “So far this decade, 115,000 people have left Cleveland, for other climes. Nearly 30,000 people have left Youngstown, Ohio, and they aren't being replaced by either new babies or new immigrants.”10
This is not to argue that people should have to stay in cities. But it is an argument for understanding what creates the middle class, acknowledging that the middle class is critical to the success of the United States—and truthfully, in my view, the world—and fostering programs that create the engendering of a healthy middle class.
As badly as outsourcing and the end of manufacturing has affected the middle class, however, worse yet is the crippling burden of the illness-profit industry. As I write this, the United States is engaged in an insane debate over healthcare. The argument today is over “death panels” where they “pull the plug on grandma.” Politicians who, a few years ago, voted for exactly the same quite sensible end-of-life government-funded counseling now compare this with the Soviet Union. We have people dependent on Medicare screaming against socialist government medical programs. The whole debate has become surreal and absurd.
Today the Obama Administration let it be known that the “public option” (the government run option) that was the central promise of the campaign is now in jeopardy. The New York Times reported, “The White House, facing increasing skepticism over President Obama's call for a public insurance plan to compete with the private sector, signaled Sunday that it was willing to compromise and would consider a proposal for a nonprofit health cooperative being developed in the Senate.”11
By the time this is published the vote that will determine our fate will most probably have been taken. Depending on how it goes, its effects on the middle class may be catastrophic. Here's why:
The U.S. Census Bureau reports 18% of the American population under the age of 65 was without health insurance in 2007, their latest data available—that's almost 46 million Americans.12 As I reported in my last essay,13 in a rare conjoining of interests, researchers from both Harvard University's law and medical schools and Ohio University recently reported that 60% of all bankruptcies in 2007 arose from medical bills and the debt they created, often in middle-class insured families, and not just in the unemployed and/or uninsured as one might be tempted to think.
The researchers noted further that this trend was precipitous and negative, increasing 50% just between 2001 and 2007. Today people much like yourself are 2.38 times more likely to face a medical crisis with profound financial consequences.14 That's the conservative view.
According to the National Coalition on Health Care, “The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) estimated that the percentage of uninsured Americans under age 65 represented 27 percent of the population. According to the MEPS data, nearly 54 million Americans under the age of 65 were uninsured in the first half of 2007. Furthermore,
A recent study shows that based on the effects of the recession alone (not job loss), it is projected that nearly seven (7) million Americans will lose their health insurance coverage between 2008 and 2010. Urban Institute researchers estimate that if unemployment reaches 10 percent, another six (6) million Americans will lose their health insurance coverage. Taking these numbers together, it is conceivable that by next year, 57 to 60 million Americans will be uninsured.15
If we have allowed a small but vocal and violent minority to derail national healthcare, with a public option, the effects will extend far beyond the medical. If we haven't substantially changed the illness-profit industry into a real healthcare system, it is projected that between now and 2010 at least seven million more Americans will lose their health insurance.16 Many will fall out of the middle class.
Why does the middle class matter so much to America's health as a nation? Because the middle class, as a group, hold their positions as a result of their own efforts. Their affluence is not dependent on inherited wealth or special deals. Attaining what they have has given them a confidence neither the rich nor the poor can match, as well as a capacity to be flexible and supple. There is a direct correlation, in a global world, between the capacity to innovate and to persevere in the face of adverse immediate conditions and social health. To be deficient in either quality places a nation in peril. The middle class represents the portion of the population that fulfills this need best. The poor all too often are too beaten down and depressed to innovate, and the rich most frequently lack the impetus to do so.
These problems have a political dimension to be sure and certainly have political solutions. But this should not be seen as a partisan issue. Whether one is a Democrat or a Republican, it is incumbent on us as a nation to reverse this destruction of the middle class if we are to deal with what the 21st century holds for us.
References
1. Malthus T. An essay on principle of population. (1766–1834) Mineola, NY: Dover Publications; 2007;.
2. Franklin B. Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.. Writings. Vol III. pp. 63-73 https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ny8b1ij62D8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA215&dq=Observations+concerning+the+Increase+of+Mankind&ots=DKnwE4XGh2&sig=wKE63QSkedPtAEdF2jfL6GqOKYA#v=onepage&q=&f=fasleAccessed August 4, 2009.
3. Nash GB. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. 1979;Cambridge, Mass: 390-391.
4. Thayer T. Town into city, 1746-1765. In: Weigley RF editors. Philadelphia—A 300-Year History. New York, NY: Norton; 1982;p. 79.
5. Hawke D. The Colonial Experience. New York, NY: Babbs-Merrill; 1966;68-77.
6. In: Eliot CW editors. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New York, NY: P. F. Collier & Son Co; 1909;https://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed-new?id=Fra2Aut&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive/eng-parsed&tag=publicAccessed August 9, 2009.
7. Tencer D. Concentration of wealth in hands of rich greatest on record. The Raw Story. August 15, 2009. Raw Story (https://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/15/concentration-of-wealth-in-hands-of-rich/Accessed) August 15, 2009.
8. Goldman D. The top 10 highest paid CEOs are … CNN/Money. August 14, 2009. https://money.cnn.com/2009/08/14/news/companies/highest_paid_ceos/Accessed August 14, 2009.
9. Berube A. The middle class is missing (New York) (Brookings. July 08, 2006). https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2006/0708metropolitanpolicy_berube.aspxAccessed August 7, 2009.
10. Zumbrun J. America's fastest-dying cities. Forbes. August 5, 2008. America's Fastest-Dying Cities - Forbes.com (https://www.forbes.com/2008/08/04/economy-ohio-michigan-biz_cx_jz_0805dying.htmlAccessed) August 7, 2009.
11. Stolberg SG. ‘Public option’ in health plan may be dropped (The New York Times. August 16, 2009). https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/health/policy/17talkshows.html?hpAccessed August 16, 2009.
12. DeNavas W, Proctor CB, Smith J. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census; 2008;.
13. Schwartz S. The illness profit industry and national security. Explore (NY). 2009;5:197–199. Abstract | Full Text | Full-Text PDF (149 KB) | CrossRef
14. Chu MC, Rhoades JA. The Uninsured in America, 1996-2007: Estimates for the U.S. Civilian Noninstitutionalized Population under Age 65. Rockville, Md: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; 2008;Statistical Brief 214.
15. Health Insurance Coverage. National Coalition on Health Care. https://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtmlAccessed August 9, 2009.
16. Gilmer TP, Kronick RG. Hard times and health insurance: how many Americans will be uninsured by 2010? Health Aff. Web Exclusive, May 28, 2009.
Stephan A. Schwartz is the editor of the daily Web publication The SchwartzReport (The Schwartz Report (https://www.schwartzreport.net)), which concentrates on trends that will shape the future, an area of research he has been working in since the mid-1960s. For over 35 years he has also been an active experimentalist doing research on the nature of consciousness, particularly remote viewing, healing, creativity, religious ecstasy, and meditation. He is the author of several books and numerous papers, technical reports, and general audience articles on these topics.