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Last year's economy should have won the Oscar for best picture. Growth in gross domestic product was 4.1 percent; profits soared; exports flourished; and inflation stayed around 3 percent for the third year. So why did so many Americans give the picture a lousy B rating？ The answer is jobs. The macroeconomic situation was good, but the microeconomic numbers were not. Yes, 3 million new jobs were there, but not enough of them were permanent, good jobs paying enough to support a family. Job insecurity was rampant. Even as they announced higher sales and profits, corporations acted as if they were in a tailspin, cutting 516,069 jobs in 1994 alone, almost as many as in the recession year of 1991.
Yes, unemployment went down. But over 1 million workers were so discouraged they left the labor force. More than 6 million who wanted full-time work were only partially employed; and another large group was either overqualified or sheltered behind the euphemism of self-employment. We lost a million good manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 1995, continuing the trend that has reduced the blue-collar work force from about 30 percent in the 1950s to about half that today.
White-collar workers found out they were no longer immune. For the first time, they were let go in numbers virtually equal to those for blue-collar workers. Many resorted to temporary work—with lower pay, fewer benefits and less status. All this in a country where people meeting for the first time say, "What do you do？"
Then there is the matter of remuneration. Whatever happened to wage gains four years into a recovery？ The Labor Department recently reported that real wages fell 2.3 percent in the 12-month period ending this March. Since 1973, wages adjusted for inflation have declined by about a quarter for high school dropouts, by a sixth for high school graduates and by about 7 .percent for those with some college education. Only the wages of college graduates are up, by 5 percent, and recently starting salaries, even for this group, have not kept up with inflation. While the top 5 percent of the population was setting new income records almost every year, poverty rates rose from 11 percent to 15 percent. No wonder this is beginning to be called the Silent Depression.
What is going on here？ In previous business cycles, companies with rising productivity raised wages to keep labor. Is the historical link between productivity improvements and income growth severed？ Of all the reasons given for the wage squeeze—international competition, technology, deregulation, the decline of unions and defense cuts--technology is probably the most critical. It has favored the educated and skilled. Just think that in 1976, 78 percent of auto workers and steelworkers in good mass production jobs were high school dropouts. But these jobs are disappearing fast. Education and job training are what count. These days college graduates can expect to earn 1.9 times the likely earnings of high school graduates, up from 1.45 times in the 1970s.
The earning squeeze on middle-class and working-class people and the scarcity of "good, high-paying" jobs will be the big political issue of the 1990s.
Americans have so far responded to their failing fortunes by working harder. American males now toil about a week and a half longer than they did in 1973, the first time this century working hours have increased over an extended period of time. Women, particularly in poorer families, are working harder, too. Two-worker families rose by more than 20 percent in the 1980s. Seven million workers hold at least two jobs, the highest proportion in half a century.
America is simply not growing fast enough to tighten the labor market and push up real wages. The danger of the information age is that while in the short run it may be cheaper to replace workers with technology, in the long run it is potentially self-destructive because the
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According to a Washington Post report, General Sanchez might have ______ the abuse of prisoners.
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According to U.S. officials,
In news reports, to call a woman "grandmotherly" is shorthand for "kindly, frail, harmless, keeper of the family antimacassars, and operationally past tense."
For anthropologists and ethnographers of yore, grandmothers were crones, an impediment to "real" research. The renowned ethnographer Charles William Merton Hart, who in the 1920's studied the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of Australia, described the elder females there as "a terrible nuisance" and "physically quite revolting" and in whose company he was distressed to find himself on occasion, yet whose activities did not merit recording or analyzing with anything like the attention he paid to the men, the young women, even the children.
But for a growing number of evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists, grandmothers represent a key to understanding human prehistory, and the particulars of why we are as we are slow to grow up and start breeding but remarkably fruitful once we get there, empathetic and generous as animals go, and family-focused to a degree hardly seen elsewhere in the primate order.
As a result, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists and demographers are starting to pay more attention to grandmothers': what they did in the past, whether and how they made a difference to their families' welfare, and what they are up to now in a sampling of cultures around the world.
At a recent international conference—the first devoted to grandmothers—researchers concluded with something approaching a consensus that grandmothers in particular, and elder female kin in general, have been an underrated source of power and sway in our evolutionary heritage. Grandmothers, they said, are in a distinctive evolutionary category. They are no longer reproductively active themselves, as older males may struggle to be, but they often have many hale years ahead of them; and as the existence of substantial proportions of older adults among even the most "primitive" cultures indicates, such durability is nothing new.
If, over the span of human evolution, postmenopausal women have not been using their stalwart bodies for bearing babies, they very likely have been directing their considerable energies elsewhere.
Say, over the river and through the woods. It turns out that there is h reason children are perpetually yearning for the flour-dusted, mythical figure called grandma or granny or oma or abuelita. As a number of participants at the conference demonstrated, the presence or absence of a grandmother often spelled the difference in traditional subsistence cultures between life or death for the grandchildren. In fact, having a grandmother around sometimes improved a child's prospects to a far greater extent than did the presence of a father.
Dr. Ruth Mace and Dr. Rebecca Sear of the department of anthropology at University College in London, for example, analyzed demographic information from rural Gambia that was collected from 1950 to 1974, when child mortality rates in the area were so high that even minor discrepancies in care could be all too readily tallied. The anthropologists found that for Gambian toddlers, weaned from the protective balm of breast milk but not yet possessing strength and immune vigor of their own, the presence of a grandmother cut their chances of dying in half.
"The surprising result to us was that if the father was alive or dead didn't matter," Dr. Mace said in a telephone interview. "If the grandmother dies, you notice it; if the father does, you don't."
Importantly, this beneficent granny effect derived only from maternal grandmothers— the mother of one's mother.
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