Shifting Baselines

The American Dream might be wearing a little thin. In Rags to Rags, Riches to Riches from June's Atlantic Monthly, Clive Crook describes how most researchers now give America much lower marks than they used to for intergenerational economic mobility.

Before the 1990s, researchers tended to put the correlation between parents' incomes and their children's at around 20 percent, implying a high degree of mobility between generations. In the 1990s...experts tended to put that figure at about 40 percent. Recent estimates run as high as 60 percent.

Mobility has not necessarily fallen, but techniques for measuring income mobility have improved. Americans must now admit that our society is a lot less economically mobile than we once believed. In fact, we're lower in the ranks than Canada, all Scandinavian countries, and maybe even Britain (!).

In America, more than in other advanced economies, poor children stay poor.

While Crook suggests retaining the estate tax, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and sharing some of Harvard's $30 billion endowment with universities that actually need money, there is another solution. Give up.

Enter Despair, Inc., a company with a firm understanding of reality and a line of products that does, too. Their best-sellers are posters that put an Adbusters spin on those corny motivational 'cheer-ups' that don the hallways of corporate offices. Here is Despair, Inc.'s mission statement:

MOTIVATION. Psychology tells us that motivation- true, lasting motivation- can only come from within. Common sense tells us it can't be manufactured or productized. So how is it that a multi-billion dollar industry thrives through the sale of motivational commodities and services? Because, in our world of instant gratification, people desperately want to believe that there are simple solutions to complex problems. And when desperation has disposable income, market opportunities abound.

AT DESPAIR, INC., we believe motivational products create unrealistic expectations, raising hopes only to dash them. That's why we created our soul-crushingly depressing Demotivators designs, so you can skip the delusions that motivational products induce and head straight for the disappointments that follow!