Dispelling the Myth of the Wealthy American Expat, or Are Americans Free to Live Outside the United States?

There is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all‐powerful

BackgroundAmid growing wealth disparity, we have little information on how health among older Americans compares with that among older Europeans across the distribution of wealth.MethodsWe performed a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age who were included in the Health and Retirement Study and the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe between 2010 and 2022. Wealth quartiles were defined according to age group and country, with quartile 1 comprising the poorest participants and quartile 4 the wealthiest. Mortality and Kaplan–Meier curves were estimated for each wealth quartile across the United States and 16 countries in northern and western, southern, and eastern Europe. We used Cox proportional-hazards models that included adjustment for baseline covariates (age group, sex, marital status [ever or never married], educational level [any or no college education], residence [rural or nonrural], current smoking status [smoking or nonsmoking], and absence or presence of a previously diagnosed long-term condition) to quantify the association between wealth quartile and all-cause mortality from 2010 through 2022 (the primary outcome).ResultsAmong 73,838 adults (mean [±SD] age, 65±9.8 years), a total of 13,802 (18.7%) died during a median follow-up of 10 years. Across all participants, greater wealth was associated with lower mortality, with adjusted hazard ratios for death (quartile 2, 3, or 4 vs. quartile 1) of 0.80 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.76 to 0.83), 0.68 (95% CI, 0.65 to 0.71), and 0.60 (95% CI, 0.57 to 0.63), respectively. The gap in survival between the top and bottom wealth quartiles was wider in the United States than in Europe. Survival among the participants in the top wealth quartiles in northern and western Europe and southern Europe appeared to be higher than that among the wealthiest Americans. Survival in the wealthiest U.S. quartile appeared to be similar to that in the poorest quartile in northern and western Europe.ConclusionsIn cohort studies conducted in the United States and Europe, greater wealth was associated with lower mortality, and the association between wealth and mortality appeared to be more pronounced in the United States than in Europe.

Guest Editor's Introduction: The Ballets Russes in North America

Farley calls for health reform in the United States to pay increased attention to social and behavioral determinants of health, rather than the typical single-minded pursuit of health care system reform.1 He convincingly argues that addressing underlying causes or disruptions of well-being is the most effective strategy for improving population health. Outcomes from nations emphasizing social investments over medical ones strengthen that assertion, and suggest that if better health is the goal, the United States is investing too much in the wrong place. Among nations of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), increased social spending is linked to lower infant mortality and longer life expectancy.2 Compared with fellow OECD countries, the United States spends little on social investments (Table 1) while simultaneously hemorrhaging disproportionately large sums from a health care system that provides below-average results.3 Spending more on health care does not increase health, and increased health care spending does not necessarily correlate with higher social spending (Table 1). TABLE 1 Relative rankings of OECD countries for select expenditures and health outcomes: 2003–2005 Universal access to health care is a worthy goal, but it may do little to improve overall health in the United States. Even the wealthiest Americans who currently enjoy such access, 50 to 74 year-olds earning equal to or greater than $496 000 per year, appear to manifest the effects of neglected social priorities with poorer health than do their European counterparts.4 Furthermore, although Scotland provides universal health care access, social inequities still cause the wealthiest Scots to live an average of 28 years longer than do the poorest.5 As we can see, more of the same health care is not necessarily the answer. Although the tendency for Europeans to be generally healthier than Americans despite spending fewer health care dollars is well established,3,4,6 it should not be assumed that more efficient use and equitable distribution of health care is the principle contributor to their well-being. Those better outcomes are more likely a result of a greater emphasis on social policy. Correspondingly, the assumption that poor population health in the United States is primarily attributable to health care that is wasteful, inefficient, and not available to all citizens deserves reconsideration. Reforms in US health care delivery, access, and funding are certainly needed, and spending the OECD average of 9% of gross domestic product on health care should be sufficient to manage the burden of illness we face. But meaningful improvements in population health may require us to invest as heavily in social programs as the healthiest OECD nations (between 20-30% of gross domestic product; Table 1). Evidence increasingly indicates that social policies that care for people are the best investments for health.

The State of Working America, 2008/2009. By Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz. An Economic Policy Institute Book. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 461 p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Reviewed by: Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War by Michael David Cohen Jennifer Oast (bio) Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War. By Michael David Cohen. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. 288 Cloth, $45.00.) In Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War, Michael David Cohen argues that higher education in the United States was permanently altered by the Civil War. Because of the war, Cohen asserts, many colleges adopted more professional and practical curricula, such as schools of engineering. Another consequence of the war was that student bodies became more diverse as less wealthy Americans, women, and African Americans enrolled in college in greater numbers. Cohen also traces the growing role of the federal government in both public and private institutions through legislation like the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862. Finally, Cohen examines the efforts of southern colleges to recover from the damage suffered during the war. This cogently argued book challenges the tendency to dismiss or ignore the effects of the war on American colleges that likely results from the reluctance of historians of education to situate their own research within the vast historiography on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Cohen’s book is an important addition to the history of American higher education and has much to interest historians of the Reconstruction era. However, Reconstructing the Campus also includes a rich discussion of the wartime experiences of college students, and there is much to interest scholars of nineteenth-century African American and women’s history as well. Cohen grounds this book in case studies of seven geographically representative colleges: Harvard University and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in the North; South Carolina College and Wesleyan Female College in the South; Cornell College and the University of Missouri in the Midwest; and the College of California in the West. The colleges in his [End Page 607] sample include men’s and women’s schools, both public and private. Cohen also includes evidence from many other colleges not among his case studies, such as Oberlin and the University of Virginia. Cohen begins by examining how college students and faculty members were affected by the coming of the Civil War. Student and faculty enlistments drained colleges of their students, in some cases completely, as was briefly the case at South Carolina College. Other schools, like Harvard, lost a sizable minority of its students, and those who remained formed the College Drill Club so that they “could get a taste of war without actually leaving” (31). At women’s colleges, enrollment also dropped as women left to serve as nurses at the front or returned home to help on the farm when brothers left for war. Women who remained were involved in such work as raising money for new hospitals or knitting and sewing items for the soldiers. At Wesleyan Female College, women practiced military drills bearing imitation guns. As the war continued, many colleges found their college buildings co-opted for wartime uses. South Carolina College became a hospital in 1862, for example, while the University of Missouri became a Union military camp. Cohen argues convincingly that colleges changed their curriculum in response to the Civil War. Not surprisingly, military curricula proliferated during and after the war. The Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 was an important impetus for these changes, providing each state with funds for colleges that would train students in agricultural studies, engineering, and military tactics. After the war, the federal government also paid the salaries of military professors at colleges and provided equipment for military studies. These additions to the curriculum, Cohen asserts, created some of the first comprehensive universities in the United States. Admissions practices also changed after the Civil War, as a more diverse group of students came to American colleges during Reconstruction, especially in the South. While some midwestern colleges like Cornell College were already coeducational and economically diverse before the war, college attendance in the South was mostly limited to elite white young men. But with the southern economy permanently altered after the war, southern colleges had to diversify their student bodies in order to remain viable. Reconstruction...

The Saboteurs’ Case David J. Danelski The Saboteurs’ Case—Ex parte Quirin— arose June 27, 1942, when the FBI announced the capture of eight German saboteurs who had landed on American shores carrying crates of explosives.1 Within a week, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a secret military trial of the saboteurs and issued a proclamation closing the civil courts to them. Three weeks after the trial began, the Supreme Court convened in spe­ cial session to determine the trial’s constitution­ ality. Relaxing its rules, the Court decided the case in less than twenty-four hours. Three months later—after six ofthe saboteurs had been executed—the Court delivered its formal opin­ ion. That was just the surface of the case. Un­ derlying the official version is a fascinating tale ofintrigue, betrayal, and propaganda; a prosecu­ tion designed to obtain the death penalty; ques­ tions ofjudicial disqualification; a rush to judg­ ment, an agonizing effort to justify a fait accompli; negotiation, compromise, and even an appeal to patriotism in an effort to achieve a unanimous opinion. Intrigue and Betrayal When the United States declared war on Ger­ many in 1941, Adolph Hitler himself demanded prompt action against the Americans on their own soil. The German High Command re­ sponded with a plan to send saboteurs to the United States by U-boat. The plan had both mili­ tary and propaganda goals. The saboteurs were instructed not only to blow up American war plants, bridges, and transportation facilities, but also to set explosive devices in department stores and railroad stations to create public panic. The High Command assigned the task of recruiting and training the saboteurs to Lieutenant Walter Kappe, a thirty-seven-year-old loyal Nazi who had lived in the United States for twelve years, working mostly as a journalist for German-lan­ guage newspapers. He was very active in the German-American Bund; in the mid-1930s he had challenged Fritz Kuhn—the American Fuehrer—for leadership ofthe Bund. A man with an ironic sense ofhumor, Kappe gave the Ameri­ can mission its code name, “Operation Pastorius,” after Franz Daniel Pastorius, leader of the first German immigrant community in Pennsylvania, and Kappe chose the Fourth of July, 1942, as the day for his agents’ first rendezvous in the United States.2 Kappe sought recruits like himself—Ger­ mans who had lived in the United States for sev­ eral years and who had proven their loyalty to the Reich by returning to the Fatherland after Hitler rose to power. Kappe recruited twelve agents and chose eight of them for Operation Pastorius. He then divided the eight into two 62 SABOTEURS’ CASE groups of four, each with a leader. He chose George John Dasch and Edward John Kerling as leaders. Dasch, a former waiter who had been edu­ cated in a Catholic seminary in Dusseldorf, came to the United States in 1922 at the age of nine­ teen and returned to Germany in 1940. Although he had not been a member of the Nazi Party or the Bund, Dasch managed to get a job in the German foreign office as a radio monitor and translator. Voluble and egocentric, he impressed Kappe with his glib intelligence and American manners and speech. Kerling had joined the Nazi Party in 1928 when he was an engineering student at Freiburg University. Emigrating to the United States in 1929 at the age of twenty-one, he made arrange­ ments to continue his Party membership. His membership number was under 100,000, which placed him in the Old Guard and gave him spe­ cial status in the party. Until his return to Ger­ many in 1940, Kerling had been employed as a butler and chauffeur for wealthy Americans, but, unlike Dasch, he had not become Americanized. Kappe was impressed by Kerling’s intelligence, strength of character, and loyalty to the Nazi cause. When Kappe recruited him, Kerling was working for the Propaganda Ministry.3 Two of Kappe’s recruits—Ernest Peter Burger and Herbert Hans Haupt—were natural­ ized American citizens. Burger, who was thirtyfive , had participated in Hitler’s Munich Beer Of the eight German saboteurs, only two, Ernest Peter Burger and Edward John...

It is important to know what wealthy Americans seek from politics and how (if at all) their policy preferences differ from those of other citizens. There can be little doubt that the wealthy exert more political influence than the less affluent do. If they tend to get their way in some areas of public policy, and if they have policy preferences that differ significantly from those of most Americans, the results could be troubling for democratic policy making. Recent evidence indicates that “affluent” Americans in the top fifth of the income distribution are socially more liberal but economically more conservative than others. But until now there has been little systematic evidence about the truly wealthy, such as the top 1 percent. We report the results of a pilot study of the political views and activities of the top 1 percent or so of US wealth-holders. We find that they are extremely active politically and that they are much more conservative than the American public as a whole with respect to important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs. Variation within this wealthy group suggests that the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wealth-holders (people with $40 million or more in net worth) may tend to hold still more conservative views that are even more distinct from those of the general public. We suggest that these distinctive policy preferences may help account for why certain public policies in the United States appear to deviate from what the majority of US citizens wants the government to do. If this is so, it raises serious issues for democratic theory.

Until the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a disturbing absence marked American political life. The nation's economic miseries continued, with unemployment high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens yawned wider than at any time since the 1920s. Yet, except for the big demonstrations and energetic recall campaigns that roiled Wisconsin, critics of big business, big finance, and government cutbacks had failed to organize a serious protest movement against the people and policies that bungled the United States into recession in the first place. What happened to the anti-corporate Left?

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, first thousands, then tens of thousands of Americans traveled to Europe annually. Their designation in official statistics as “ocean-bound tourists” reflects that general view, both at the time and currently. At issue is only whether travel to Europe became sufficiently general to justify the label “mass” or “middle-class” tourism. In this article I show that American travelers to Europe, in fact, bore the stamp of the inequality that characterized their society. In steerage, mainly naturalized American citizens, precariously employed in the United States, crossed to Europe in numbers that fluctuated widely in response to changing conditions in the labor market. They were largely invisible among other emigrants responding to the same economic pressures. In contrast, cabin class witnessed a steadily growing and well-publicized summer exodus as the “habit” of European travel became general among wealthy Americans. Transatlantic tourism remained largely out of reach for the middle class. The article draws on official statistics on passenger volumes, original passenger lists, and contemporary press accounts to investigate the characteristics of travelers in cabin and steerage. The affordability of European travel is assessed using contemporary estimates of travel costs and income distribution.

Income inequality has become one of the more widely debated social issues today. The current article explores the role of progressive taxation in income inequality and happiness. Using historical data in the United States from 1962 to 2014, we found that income inequality was substantially smaller in years when the income tax was more progressive (i.e., a higher tax rate for higher income brackets), even when controlling for variables like stock market performance and unemployment rate. Time lag analyses further showed that higher progressive taxation predicted increasingly lower income inequality up to 5 years later. Data from the General Social Survey (1972-2014; N = 59,599) with U.S. residents (hereafter referred to as "Americans") showed that during years with higher progressive taxation rates, less wealthy Americans-those in the lowest 40% of the income distribution-tended to be happier, whereas the richest 20% were not significantly less happy. Mediational analyses confirmed that the association of progressive taxation with the happiness of less wealthy Americans can be explained by lower income inequality in years with higher progressive taxation. A separate sample of Americans polled online (N = 373) correctly predicted the positive association between progressive taxation and the happiness of poorer Americans but incorrectly expected a strong negative association between progressive taxation and the happiness of richer Americans. (PsycINFO Database Record

We explore the possibility that the US political system can usefully be characterized as oligarchic. Using a material-based definition drawn from Aristotle, we argue that oligarchy is not inconsistent with democracy; that oligarchs need not occupy formal office or conspire together or even engage extensively in politics in order to prevail; that great wealth can provide both the resources and the motivation to exert potent political influence. Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political influence than average citizens and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in certain key areas. A brief review of the literature suggests possible mechanisms by which such influence could occur, through lobbying, the electoral process, opinion shaping, and the US Constitution itself.

Solving obesity without addressing poverty: Fat chance

The role of business in the American political system has always stirred emotions. Contemporary evidence of the clear and growing disparities in wealth between ordinary citizens and business elites has drawn new attention to this topic. Recently, the canon on the activities of business elites in politics has grown, as we have learned a great deal about how business firms and their ultra-wealthy leaders and investors seek to exert political influence. This book examines one form of business elite activity that has thus far received surprisingly little scholarly attention despite the high-profile political efforts of billionaire businesspeople such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Specifically, the book examines what we call the new entrepreneurial advocacy. Where previous work focuses on a cross section of either the wealthiest Americans or the largest firms in the United States, this book takes a deep dive into the political activities of a single yet pivotal cohort: the founders and CEOs of Silicon Valley firms. Leveraging a vast range of unique data sets—spanning the political donations of firms and their leaders; the local, state, and Washington lobbying of Silicon Valley firms; the social media and media commentary of Silicon Valley CEOs and founders; and the role of elites in supporting and founding new political organizations—this book shines a light on the role of this important set of elites in contemporary American political life.

One explanation that has been proposed for rising inequality is that technical change allows highly talented individuals, or “superstars” to manage or perform on a larger scale, applying their talent to greater pools of resources and reaching larger numbers of people, thus becoming more productive and higher paid. Others argue that managerial power has increased in a way that allows those at the top to receive higher pay, that social norms against higher pay levels have broken down, or that tax policy affects the distribution of surpluses between employers and employees. We offer evidence bearing on the different theories explaining the rise in inequality in the United States over recent decades. First we look the increase in pay at the highest income levels across occupations. We consider the income share of the top 1 percent over time. And we turn to evidence on inequality of wealth at the top. In looking at the wealthiest Americans, we find that those in the Forbes 400 are less likely to have inherited their wealth or to have grown up wealthy. The Forbes 400 of today also are those who were able to access education while young and apply their skills to the most scalable industries: technology, finance, and mass retail. We believe that the US evidence on income and wealth shares for the top 1 percent is most consistent with a “superstar”-style explanation rooted in the importance of scale and skill-biased technological change. It is less consistent with an argument that the gains to the top 1 percent are rooted in greater managerial power or changes in social norms about what managers should earn.