The best and brightest people I’ve met in my life haven’t been the most successful ones. America doesn’t work that way now. It probably never did, but it seems to be getting worse. What people believe to be a promise has become, at best, a lottery ticket.

I watched Carly Fiorina on TV the other day extolling Mitt Romney’s great command of facts and figures at the first Presidential debate. Like, say, his assertion that half of the clean tech companies that the President invested stimulus money in had gone belly up. Except that isn’t close to the truth. From what I can gather, more than 90% of those companies have thus far been successful. That’s an amazing rate. Far better than Romney’s record at Bain and far, far better than Fiorina’s lousy tenure at Hewlett-Packard. I’m all for inventors and creators and builders making good, but you have to question a system that so richly rewards an executive like Fiorina, who contributes little, or Romney, who doesn’t acknowledge he had a huge advantage in a very uneven playing field because of family money and connections. The disconnect between such people and most Americans is enormous.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz has been calling bullshit on the situation for some time now. From a recent Q&A with him at Spiegel: 

“Spiegel: 

The US has always thought of itself as a land of opportunity where people can go from rags to riches. What has become of the American dream?

Stiglitz:

This belief is still powerful, but the American dream has become a myth. The life chances of a young US citizen are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any other advanced industrial country for which there is data. The belief in the American dream is reinforced by anecdotes, by dramatic examples of individuals who have made it from the bottom to the top — but what matters most are an individual’s life chances. The belief in the American dream is not supported by the data.

Spiegel: 

What do the numbers suggest?

Stiglitz:

There has been no improvement in well-being for the typical American family for 20 years. On the other side, the top one percent of the population gets 40 percent more in one week than the bottom fifth receive in a full year. In short, we have become a divided society. America has created a marvelous economic machine, but most of the benefits have gone to the top.”