Great Expectations
Supplementary Reading Packet and Nonfiction Jigsaw Assignment
WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
JIGSAW TASK: You and your original group will read the assigned article. Then, you will break off into different groups and share the following with the new group members:
REQUIRED JIGSAW PRESENTATION COMPONENTS:
1) Connection: Explain to the group how the article connects to Great Expectations.
2) Pose a discussion question to your group class to ensure that they are engaged. These questions must generate discussion and engage peers in higher-level thinking- it can pertain to the “theme” of the article and/or apply to their lives!
*The Nonfiction Jigsaw Articles can be found online at Mr. Klingelhoffer’s Webpage under
“Nonfiction Reading Packet and Jigsaw Assignment”.
Article #1: THE ECONOMIST
Wealth inequality Your money, your life Mar 14th 2013, 14:05 by S.M. | NEW YORK
REMEMBER Occupy Wall Street? Today, 18 months after the protest movement sprang to life in New York City and became a national phenomenon, it seems almost a will-o’-the-wisp. But as Zuccotti Park has returned to its
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor are needed to see this picture.

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English pre-drum circle serenity, one of the main objectives of the Occupy movement has been chugging along: the mission to draw attention to the inequalities at play in American democracy.
Income inequality in America is at levels not seen since the 1920s , and the story is getting a lot of air time. One nifty video , which has gone as viral as a wonkish research report could ever go, suggests that 40% of the nation’s wealth is controlled by the Occupy-derided "one percent”, while the bottom 40% of Americans hold only 1% of the wealth. The video, produced by the unassuming, graphics-gifted Politizane, has attracted over
4m viewers and helps to correct Americans’ misperceptions about the extent of inequality in their polity.
Meanwhile, Joseph Stiglitz has thrown the weight of his Nobel prize in economics behind a book on the subject—"The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future"—and penned a New
York Times op-ed calling equality of opportunity a “national myth” .
Adding injury to insult, new research reported in the Washington Post finds a link between America's wealth inequality and the life-expectancy gap . Focusing on men and women in two counties in Florida, the data show that being on the wrong side of the wealth gap can, quite literally, kill you.
[St. John’s] county’s plentiful and well-tended golf courses teem with youthful-looking retirees. The same is true on the county’s 41 miles of Atlantic Ocean beaches, abundant tennis courts and extensive network of biking and hiking trails.The healthy lifestyles pay off. Women here can expect to live to be nearly 83, four years longer than they did just two decades earlier, according to research at the University of Washington . Male life expectancy is more than 78 years, six years longer than two decades ago.
But in neighboring Putnam County, life is neither as idyllic nor as long. Incomes and housing values are about half what they are in St. Johns. And life expectancy in Putnam has barely budged since 1989, rising less than a year for women to just over 78. Meanwhile, it has crept up by a year and a half for men, who can expect to live to be just over 71, seven years less than the men living a few miles away in St. Johns.
On one hand, none of this is surprising: more money translates into better health care, more leisure, more exercise and less unhealthy fast food. It is not a shock that individuals in the wealthier county would live longer lives, on average. But the research is notable for three reasons. First, the numbers aren’t trivial. We’re talking about a 5-10% boost in life expectancy for wealthy seniors. Second, it is not just a Florida phenomenon: “Even as the nation’s life expectancy has marched steadily upward, reaching 78.5 years in 2009, a growing body of research shows that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder”. Third, the longer lives for the rich, like a snarled subway train, cause further inequalities up and down the line.
Specifically, longer life expectancies for the rich complicate the drive to raise the retirement age and threaten to turn Social Security taxes into a regressive source of revenue. Here is why:
“People who are shorter-lived tend to make less, which means that if you raise the retirement age, low-income populations would be subsidising the lives of higher-income people,” said Maya Rockeymoore, president and chief executive of Global Policy Solutions, a public policy consultancy. “Whenever I hear a policymaker say people are living longer as a justification for raising the retirement age, I immediately think they don’t understand the research or, worse, they are willfully ignoring what the data say.”
Take a minute to process this. As a bipartisan proposal to bring entitlement spending under control, raising the retirement age to 67 or 70 will enlist the working poor to pay into the system for a few more years, curtailing their retirement years to the single digits, while the taxes they pay will flow into Social Security checks for the wealthier and healthier. A senior with a fatter bank account wins twice—with greater longevity and more years drawing Social Security checks—while the poor work longer, live fewer years and collect less in benefits.
One need not be a radical egalitarian to find this picture morally troubling. To draw upon Princeton political theorist Michael Walzer’s view of “complex equality” developed in his 1983 book "Spheres of Justice", the proposal seems wrong because it allows an inequality in one social good (wealth) to “invade the sphere” of another social good (the health and length of one’s life), and to feed back into and exacerbate wealth inequality.

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
Mr Walzer's formula holds that “no social good x should be distributed to men and women who possess some other
good y merely because they possess y and without regard to the meaning of x”. Wealth can justly enable people to buy “yachts and hi-fi sets and rugs”, he writes, and the “unequal distribution” of these goods “doesn’t matter”, but money should not be permitted to buy political power or the power to dominate others. Nor should great wealth translate into the power to lord longer life expectancies over the poor and to shift more of the burden of work and taxation onto their shoulders.
Article #2:
The New York Times
February 9, 2012

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
WASHINGTON — Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.
It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.
Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.
“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.
In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan , the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.
The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt.
Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.
“With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap,” Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.
Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, “Whither Opportunity?” compiled by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars, are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income inequality has been a central theme this election season.
The connection between income inequality among parents and the social mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as some of the Republican presidential candidates.

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.
A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March
Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.
“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha
J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from
1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.
James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.
“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”
Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California,
Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.
Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”
The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.
“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.
There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.
The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”
Article #3:

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
How Wealth Reduces Compassion
As riches grow, empathy for others seems to decline By Daisy Grewal | Tuesday, April 10, 2012 |
Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.
Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner ran several studies looking at whether social class (as measured by wealth, occupational prestige, and education) influences how much we care about the feelings of others. In one study, Piff and his colleagues discreetly observed the behavior of drivers at a busy four-way intersection. They found that luxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. This was true for both men and women upper-class drivers, regardless of the time of day or the amount of traffic at the intersection. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian.
In order to figure out whether selfishness leads to wealth (rather than vice versa), Piff and his colleagues ran a study where they manipulated people’s class feelings. The researchers asked participants to spend a few minutes comparing themselves either to people better off or worse off than themselves financially. Afterwards, participants were shown a jar of candy and told that they could take home as much as they wanted. They were also told that the leftover candy would be given to children in a nearby laboratory. Those participants who had spent time thinking about how much better off they were compared to others ended up taking significantly more candy for themselves--leaving less behind for the children.
A related set of studies published by Keltner and his colleagues last year looked at how social class influences feelings of compassion towards people who are suffering. In one study, they found that less affluent individuals are more likely to report feeling compassion towards others on a regular basis. For example, they are more likely to agree with statements such as, “I often notice people who need help,” and “It’s important to take care of people who are vulnerable.” This was true even after controlling for other factors that we know affect compassionate feelings, such as gender, ethnicity, and spiritual beliefs.
In a second study, participants were asked to watch two videos while having their heart rate monitored. One video showed somebody explaining how to build a patio. The other showed children who were suffering from cancer. After watching the videos, participants indicated how much compassion they felt while watching either video. Social class was measured by asking participants questions about their family’s level of income and education. The results of the study showed that participants on the lower end of the spectrum, with less income and education, were more likely to report feeling compassion while watching the video of the cancer patients. In addition, their heart rates slowed down while watching the cancer video—a response that is associated with paying greater attention to the feelings and motivations of others.
These findings build upon previous research showing how upper class individuals are worse at recognizing the emotions of others and less likely to pay attention to people they are interacting with (e.g. by checking their cell phones or doodling).
But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness. Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused. Another reason has to do with our attitudes towards greed. Like Gordon Gekko, upper-class people may be more likely to endorse the idea that “greed is good.” Piff and his colleagues found that wealthier people are more likely to agree with statements that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally defensible. These attitudes ended up predicting participants’ likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior.

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
Given the growing income inequality in the United States, the relationship between wealth and compassion has important implications. Those who hold most of the power in this country, political and otherwise, tend to come from privileged backgrounds. If social class influences how much we care about others, then the most powerful among us may be the least likely to make decisions that help the needy and the poor. They may also be the most likely to engage in unethical behavior.
Keltner and Piff recently speculated in the New York Times about how their research helps explain why Goldman Sachs and other high-powered financial corporations are breeding grounds for greedy behavior. Although greed is a universal human emotion, it may have the strongest pull over those of who already have the most.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas .

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
Article #4:
The New York Times
NOVEMBER 30, 2010, 3:52 PM
By TARA PARKER-POPE
How much do looks matter during a job search? A new study suggests that while handsome men do better while looking for work, good looks can end up hurting a woman’s chances of scoring a job interview.
The study, conducted by economists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, sent 5,312 résumés to more than
2,600 employers who had advertised job openings. Two applications were sent to employers, each with virtually identical résumés. The only real difference was that one of the résumés included a photograph of the applicant. Sometimes the applicant was an attractive man or woman, and sometimes the photo showed a more plain-looking man or woman. (While sending a photograph with a résumé isn’t typical in the United States, it’s not uncommon in Israel, the researchers noted.)
To choose the photographs used in the study, the researchers collected photos from 300 university students. A panel of four men and four women rated the pictures in terms of attractiveness. To eliminate potential racial bias, the judges selected photos of individuals who appeared to have a more ambiguous ethnic background.
Over all, employers sought interviews with 14.5 percent of the job candidates. Notably, 19.9 percent of the male candidates who sent attractive pictures were called in for interviews, compared to 13.7 percent of the men with “plain” photos. Only
9.2 percent of the men who didn’t send a picture were called to interview.
Based on the response rate in the study, an attractive man needs to send an average of five résumés with a photo to get one interview. An ordinary-looking man needs to send 11 résumés with a photo to get a single interview.
But the apparent bias in favor of job candidates with photos didn’t hold true for women. Women who didn’t send photos had a 16.6 percent callback rate, the highest response rate from prospective employers. Résumés accompanied by a photo of a “plain” woman received callback responses 13.6 percent of the time, compared with 12.8 for those accompanied by photos of attractive women.
The researchers found that the response rate was about the same for all categories of women when the résumé was sent to employment agencies. When résumés were sent directly to a company, however, attractive women were only half as likely to receive a response as plain women and those who didn’t send a picture, a difference that was statistically meaningful.
That suggests that when the hiring is done by the company where the job candidate will work, the people doing the hiring appear to strongly discriminate against attractive women.
After the study was complete, the researchers contacted the companies to determine who at each of the firms was in charge of screening job candidates. At nearly every firm, the person in charge of screening résumés was a young woman, from 23 to 34 years old, and typically single. The researchers concluded that callback rates most likely were influenced by the screener’s jealousy “when confronted with a young, attractive competitor in the workplace.”
In addition, the survey of employers found different reactions to résumés accompanied by photos, depending on the gender of the job candidate. When a man included a photo with his résumé, employers found that it showed confidence and that the candidate was presentable. But when a woman included a photo, it was viewed as a negative, suggesting the woman was “attempting to market herself via her appearance.”
“Our results show that beauty distorts the hiring process,” the researchers concluded. “Suitably qualified attractive women and plain men and women may be eliminated early on from the selection process.”

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
Article #5:
New York Times January 14, 2012
Among the Wealthiest 1 Percent, Many Variations
By SHAILA DEWAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF
KINGS POINT, N.Y. — Adam Katz is happy to talk to reporters when he is promoting his business, a charter flight company based on Long Island called Talon Air.
But when the subject was his position as one of America’s top earners, he balked. Seated at a desk fashioned from a jet fuel cell, wearing a button-down shirt with the company logo, he considered the public relations benefits and found them lacking: “It’s not very popular to be in the 1 percent these days, is it?”
A few months ago, Mr. Katz was just a successful businessman with five children, an $8 million home, a family real estate company in Manhattan and his passion, 10-year-old Talon Air.
Now, the colossal gap between the very rich and everyone else — the 1 percent versus the 99 percent — has become a rallying point in this election season. As President Obama positions himself as a defender of the middle class, and Mitt
Romney, the wealthiest of the Republican presidential candidates, decries such talk as “the bitter politics of envy,” Mr. Katz has found himself on the wrong end of a new paradigm.
As a member of the 1 percent, he is part of a club whose name conjures images of Wall Street bosses who are chauffeured from manse to Manhattan and fat cats who have armies of lobbyists at the ready.
But in reality it is a far larger and more varied group, one that includes podiatrists and actuaries, executives and entrepreneurs, the self-made and the silver spoon set. They are clustered not just in New York and Los Angeles, but also in
Denver and Dallas. The range of wealth in the 1 percent is vast — from households that bring in $380,000 a year, according to census data, up to billionaires like Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates.
The top 1 percent of earners in a given year receives just under a fifth of the country’s pretax income, about double their share 30 years ago. They pay just over a fourth of all federal taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center. In 2007, they accounted for about 30 percent of philanthropic giving, according to Federal Reserve data. They received 22 percent of their income from capital gains, compared with 2 percent for everybody else.
Still, they are not necessarily the idle rich. Mr. Katz, who sometimes commutes by amphibious plane and sometimes carries luggage for Talon Air passengers, likes to say he works “26/9.”
Most 1 percenters were born with socioeconomic advantages, which helps explain why the 1 percent is more likely than other Americans to have jobs, according to census data. They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99 percent to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed. Married 1 percenters are just as likely as other couples to have two incomes, but men are the big breadwinners, earning 75 percent of the money, compared with 64 percent of the income in other households.
Though many of the wealthy lean toward the Republican Party, in interviews, 1 percenters expressed a broad range of views on how to fix the economy. They think that President Obama is ruining it, or that Republicans in Congress have gone off the deep end. They favor a flat tax, or they believe the rich should pay a higher marginal rate. Some cheered on Occupy
Wall Street, saying it was about time, while others wished the protesters would just get a job or take a bath. Still others were philosophical — perhaps because they could afford to be — viewing the recession as something that would pass, like so many previous ups and downs.
Of the 1 percenters interviewed for this article, almost all — conservatives and liberals alike — said the wealthy could and should shoulder more of the country’s financial burden, and almost all said they viewed the current system as unfair. But they may prefer facing cuts to their own benefits like Social Security than paying more taxes. In one survey of wealthy

WNHS: Advanced Freshman English
Chicago families, almost twice as many respondents said they would cut government spending as those who said they would cut spending and raise revenue.
Even those who said the deck was stacked in their favor did not appreciate anti-rich rhetoric.
“I don’t mind paying a little bit more in taxes. I don’t mind putting money to programs that help the poor,” said Anthony J.
Bonomo of Manhasset, N.Y., who runs a medical malpractice insurance company and is a Republican. But, he said, he did mind taking a hit for the country’s woes. “If those people could camp out in that park all day, why aren’t they out looking for a job? Why are they blaming others?”
To many, 99 vs. 1 was an artificial distinction that overlooked hard work and moral character. “It shouldn’t be relevant,” said Mr. Katz , who said he both creates job and contributes to charitable causes. “I’m not hurting anyone. I’m helping a lot of people.”