Our current form of capitalism undermines America’s core ethic. It has become ridden with obstacles to social mobility. A strong commitment to fairness is essential to our nation’s conception of the common good; a less democracy-friendly capitalism violates the common good in favor of top tier of the income scale.

Large inequalities become unfair in people’s minds only when they feel that they themselves are stuck in a rut with no opportunity to improve their lot in life.

Large inequalities of income, by themselves, do not violate America’s sense of fairness. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are actually folk heroes. Large inequalities become unfair in people’s minds only when they feel that they themselves are stuck in a rut with no opportunity to improve their lot in life.

In his most recent State of the Union address, President Obama was wise to focus on social mobility rather than income inequality. Income inequality – the huge gap between rich and poor – troubles the more liberal wing of the democratic party. Opportunity inequality troubles everyone – liberals, moderates and conservatives alike.

Our economy’s recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-08 has been discouragingly slow. The recession was quite serious and the reasons for a slow recovery may yet prove to be cyclical and self-healing. If so, my hypothesis that we are witnessing a structural change in our system of capitalism may prove incorrect. Time will tell.

If my hypothesis is valid, however, we may well see higher growth rates in the next few years. But long-term unemployment will persist and wages will continue to stagnate for all but the top quintiles of the work force.

Such a scenario threatens our political stability. Inevitably, populist movements will arise both from the left and the right, further polarizing our political system. Convictions of unfairness will inflame political unrest and add to the economic distress caused by the growing gap in opportunity for self-betterment.

Add anomie to this scenario – the general erosion of norms – and you have a formula for troubled times ahead.

Two recent news items may be harbingers of a massive change in our society. If so, it will be a mostly positive change that reduces inequality and restores greater social mobility. But it may also create upheaval in our institutions of higher education.

One of the news items describes a college-support program for Starbucks employees. Starbucks and Arizona State University have agreed to a partnership whereby Starbucks will pay a big part of the tuition for employees taking online courses for credit toward a college degree.

The other news item concerns Corinthian Colleges, one of the nation’s largest for-profit colleges. Regulators are investigating whether Corinthian’s colleges have been pushing their students into high-cost loans, saddling them with debt while not delivering on their promise of well-paying jobs. Student enrollment is declining sharply and Corinthian, facing bankruptcy, agreed to sell off and shutter its campuses.

Why are these two events harbingers of change?

Many employer tuition assistance programs now exist. Indeed, in the 2011-12 school year they provided more than ten billion dollars of student aid! But the Starbucks program is one of very first partnerships between an employer and a public university offering online courses for credit toward a college B.A.

The new partnership targets a very different segment of the population than the dominant form of online college courses, known as MOOCs. Harvard, M.I.T., and other elite universities developed MOOCs essentially for the leisure pursuit of people like their own graduates and post-graduates.

Their MOOCs have a very high dropout rate – as high as 90-95 percent. This has created an unrealistic complacency among some college administrators. It has led them to conclude that online courses will always be a marginal part of higher education, supportive of face-to-face residential college courses, but not a substitute for them.

This inference may be valid for the privileged, highly educated elites who enroll in a MOOC wholly for their own self-satisfaction. But at the opposite end of the income scale, among low-income high school graduates and college dropouts, the motivation for taking online courses is starkly practical. Its one and only purpose is to improve the enrollee’s life chances for a good job and middle class income.

Many of these young people have family obligations and hold jobs (such as working at Starbucks). It is not practical for them to attend full-time residential colleges. Online courses, specifically designed for job-training purposes, fit their needs and circumstances far better than traditional residential college courses. (Of course, it will take time to learn how much additional assistance online learners may require.)

This radical shift in the target constituency for online courses is at its very earliest stages. I expect it to pick up momentum rapidly. The employer-college partnership is, I believe, an ideal format. It is intolerable that at a time when millions of Americans are suffering long-term unemployment, a million jobs or more go unfilled because of the lack of candidates with the required skills.

Large companies used to do more job training for their employees than they do in today’s cost-conscious economy. The fact that they no longer do so is simply a brutal fact of life. But there is no reason why our society has to accept a massive skills vacuum that exacerbates unemployment. Employer-college partnerships are a potential win-win for low-income students seeking college credentials, for the colleges offering the online courses and for employers seeking workers with appropriate skills.

The Corinthian bankruptcy presents a darker side of the story. The almost desperate intensity of today’s search for higher education credentials has several causes. One is the disappearance of high-paid low-skill jobs from the American economy, millions of them exported to low-wage countries. Stagnant wages for the lower two-thirds of the income scale, a pattern that has persisted from the 1970s, is the major cause. Upward mobility for low-income people has stalled badly.

There is almost universal agreement that higher education credentials are the key to good jobs at living wages, hence the groundswell of applicants to colleges.

This frantic rush of our nation’s young people to obtain higher education credentials has led to some serious dysfunctions. The vast supply of applicants has made colleges almost indifferent to the inexorable rise of tuition as well as to the huge buildup of student debt. Both trends are unsustainable and both show signs of having reached a tipping point.

If the Starbucks model proves a good fit between the needs of low-income students and employers, the colleges who seek out these sorts of partnerships will improve their stability and popularity. The thousands of colleges that fail to participate, however, may find themselves confronted with sharply declining student enrollment and the threat of insolvency.

For-profit colleges that exploit students are particularly at risk. The era of government encouraging unsustainable student loans is almost over. Those for-profit colleges that deliver full value in career training may survive. But those who feed off the student loan program without giving good value for the money will soon find themselves among the walking dead.

Most of the more than 5,000 colleges in the United States are ill prepared for the upheaval to come.

I fear that the deep trends unwinding social mobility cannot be reversed merely by modest short-term fixes like increasing the minimum wage. Of course we should do as much as possible to ensure that people with full time jobs do not fall below the poverty line. These are necessary but not sufficient actions.

We also need a long-term strategy to restore our economic and moral vitality based on a sound understanding of the deeper forces at work and how to reverse them. The least understood of these deep forces is the one undermining our social and ethical norms.

Increasingly, we equate doing wrong with breaking the law, thereby condoning selfish, irresponsible behavior as long as it is lawful. In my last post, I described this phenomenon as “anomie” -- the state of normlessness.

The causes of this condition of anomie are clear if one knows how to connect the dots.

Those of us old enough to have lived through the 1950s remember when our society was too norm-ridden, too rigid and conformist, too restrictive of the freedom of individuals to choose their own life styles. Then came the 1960s and the cultural revolution of the decades that followed. Individual freedom exploded; conformity to cultural norms weakened.

It is too glib to state that the pendulum simply swung too far -- from too much conformity to too much individual freedom. Rather, what happened was an unintended consequence of the increase in individual freedom. It wasn’t intended to weaken our culture, but it did so to an extraordinary degree.

The main source of ethical norms is culture: the thick web of religious faiths, unwritten rules, expectations, rituals, beliefs and norms that represent the cumulative experience of successive generations.

Every society has its own distinctive culture. “Distinctive” doesn’t equate with “sound;” some cultural norms promote barbarous and indecent norms, especially in relation to sexuality. The only thing worse than normlessness is a brutal system of norms.

We wouldn’t survive without the constraints of a strong culture. It would mean the collapse of civilization and stability, and war of each against all. The constant tension in all societies is the relative strength of culture in relation to the individual autonomy. It is hardly surprising that in our hunger for greater individual freedom we have inadvertently weakened the cultural values that strengthen civility, concern for the other and the common good.

We are, I believe, moving into unexplored territory. We have created a society where individual expressiveness is a “right” that all can enjoy.

But we have not yet learned how to manage the coexistence of individual freedom with the need to maintain universally respected moral norms designed to advance the common good.

The Wall Street versus Main Street narrative is popular. It is comforting to believe that greed and putting your own interests ahead of others are confined to Wall Street, while the rest of us are merely innocent, norm-abiding bystanders.

Wall Street’s behavior does feed this perception. The real estate boom preceding the Great Recession of 2007-08 featured an ugly feeding-frenzy devoid of ethics. Some of our most highly esteemed financial institutions developed a massive ethical blind spot that violated our society’s most treasured moral norms.

A closer look, however, shows a more nuanced – and balanced – picture. Yes, the banks had lowered their ethical norms. Yes, they had handed out so-called “liar mortgages” indiscriminately. Yes, the rest of us were fleeced.

But that doesn’t mean that Main Street’s ethical norms remained pristine while Wall Street’s norms deteriorated. The liar mortgages were given to people who blatantly lied about their own financial situation.

Unfortunately, we appear to be living through a period of general decline in ethical norms. Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as “anomie” – a state of normlessness.

Such periods are not “black swans” that happen only once every few centuries; they are normal occurrences that break out in all cultures at one time or another. We are living through one of these bad patches today here in the United States.

A general decline in ethical standards is not easy to detect or document.

My research on public values suggests that one sign of moral decline is an increasing frequency of over-the-top behavior by law-abiding citizens. Ordinarily well-behaved citizens engaging in bizarre and deviant behavior is a danger signal of something morally amiss in the larger society.

For example, our nation’s colleges are experiencing steady annual increases in student rape. The rape rate has now reached 20 percent – one out of five students are victims of a crime that once used to invoke the death penalty. The president of the United States cited this statistic as one of his major worries.

Our military services – the navy, army and air force – are all currently caught up in a series of scandals that has the Secretary of Defense worried about our moral character and courage. The scandals involve a wide range of violations of social norms: cheating , drug abuse, accepting kickbacks and sexual misconduct. Hundreds, if not thousands of military personnel are involved, including high-ranking admirals and generals.

On the civilian front, an ever growing of number of Congressmen and other government officials are being caught in sexual misconduct. One example of weakened moral norms stands out: In a movie theatre just outside of Tampa, Florida a 71-year-old retired police captain shot and killed a younger man – a total stranger – because the younger man wouldn’t stop texting while the movie previews were playing.

Two ordinarily law-abiding citizens allowed their own willfulness to override the most elementary of social norms, resulting in violence and tragedy. This is an extreme example of over-the-top individualism – people sweeping aside social norms that interfere with their own desires. “I’m going to do what I want. If you don’t like it, fuck you!” Ordinary citizens are crossing the line, oblivious to the moral norms that have prevailed in our society since we became a nation.

Except for kids themselves, just about everyone wants children to eat more fruits and vegetables. Even so, there’s plenty of disagreement about what government can or should do to make that happen.

For First Lady Michelle Obama, federal standards for more nutritious school lunches help “parents who are working hard to serve their kids balanced meals at home and don’t want their efforts undermined during the day at school.” But for critics, these standards are a costly and counterproductive example of government interference. They ask why “the federal government should make these decisions rather than parents, students and local school officials.”

The school lunch dispute is one of several that have emerged when governments -- federal, state, and local -- move beyond their traditional role of providing nutrition education and try to take stronger steps to combat the country’s rising obesity rates.

What’s Government’s Role?

Is there an appropriate and effective role for government in improving what we eat and helping us maintain healthier weights? What are Americans’ views here?

Some survey results suggest that Americans are ready to back broad government action to reduce obesity. Three-quarters of Americans say obesity and being overweight are very or extremely serious health care problems -- only cancer ranked higher in the public’s list. Spending proposals aimed at improving school nutrition, funding farmer’s markets and bike paths, and listing calorie counts on menus attract broad public support.

But a closer look at the surveys, along with research from Kettering and Public Agenda, shows support for government action on obesity may be much softer than it initially appears. Many people just don’t seem to be sure that government would be effective in addressing obesity or whether it should be delving into areas of personal choice and behavior. For example:

• Only a third of the public says government should be very involved in “finding solutions to this country’s obesity problem"
• The idea of using government funds to “reduce obesity by promoting healthy lifestyles” ranks next to last in a list of 15 different priorities for federal health care spending. Americans are far more likely to want government funds devoted to veterans’ health care and research to find new cures and treatments.

For most Americans, obesity is a top concern...

… but reducing obesity ranks close to last when the public ranks priorities for federal spending on health care.

• Only about a third of Americans sees a role for “communities” in addressing obesity. More than half of the public believes that “maintaining a healthy weight” is something individuals should handle personally.
• Relatively few support taxing “unhealthy foods.” Even fewer want to limit their sale. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg ran into a public firestorm when he proposed banning the sale of 32-ounce sugary soft drinks in New York. Jon Stewart — quart-sized soda firmly in hand — was one of many comedians who had a little fun with the Mayor’s idea.

Are We Too Far Gone for Prevention?

The cynical take on these results is that this is just the predictable response from a sugar- and junk-food addicted nation. But focus groups by Kettering and Public Agenda suggest that there’s more involved than simple human frailty. Given the chance to deliberate on “prevention” as an option for curbing costs, many participants doubted that it would be effective. People raised a variety of concerns. One man talked about the conflicting messages people have gotten about what’s good for their health and which foods should be limited and which are fine. “[Prevention is] commonsense,” he said, “but we're sort of too far gone right now for it.”

Another man liked the idea of prevention because it “relies on our responsibility individually to take care of ourselves.” But he also believed that solving the health care cost challenge means going after “drug companies and the legislation that’s really driving up the cost drastically.”

Other participants were skeptical that people would or could change their habits even with more education and social messaging. A participant from Alabama talked about efforts to reduce diabetes: “The education is there. But we are still having plenty of diabetes. People are just not getting it. People are not taking care.” In New Jersey, another participant was just as doubtful: "I just [don’t] think [prevention is] feasible, because people are not going to take care of themselves like this, as a whole.”

In these discussions, many participants questioned whether government and community involvement could actually help people lead healthier lives. Few could envision how public policy could alter what is essentially personal behavior. After all, prohibition didn’t stop people from drinking. Some participants just seemed daunted by the scope of the challenge — and perhaps by their own repeated failures to adopt healthier lifestyles.

Yet, as opinion research has shown over and over again, Americans’ views often evolve over time as advocates make a robust and sustained case for change. Our views on smoking certainly have. Americans’ growing support of strong government action to deter smoking has coincided with anti-tobacco campaigns using “a variety of educational, clinical, regulatory, economic, and counter-advertising strategies,”, forthright acknowledgement by the medical community about the dangers of smoking, and numerous lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Still, as recently as 2001, just 4 in 10 people wanted to ban smoking in public places. Now, nearly 6 in 10 Americans support this approach.

Our views toward smoking in public places have changed drastically, in a short time period.

Smoking used to be glamorous. Now, smokers have to huddle outside in the cold and rain just to have a cigarette. Will sugary soft drinks and empty calorie snacks suffer a similar fall from grace? Only time will tell.

Beyond the Polls is a joint endeavor of Public Agenda, the National Issues Forums, and the Kettering Foundation. Sign up to receive an email update when we have a new Beyond the Polls post.

Equality of opportunity is shrinking, and there is a growing national consensus that we must reverse this trend. Both political parties, as well as the public at large, share a reasonably sound understanding that distortions in our economy have led to stagnant wages for middle- and lower-income Americans with greater concentrations of wealth at the top.

A global economy that makes it profitable for American companies to export jobs to lower wage nations, technological advances that permit companies to replace workers with machines, high rates of unemployment that rob workers of bargaining power -- these are some of the main economic forces that create the inequality of opportunity eroding our social contract and driving American society into a hole. Now that we understand them, we are likely to move toward remedying the economic problems they create for us.

Unfortunately, we do not yet have an equally sound understanding of the non-economic forces exacerbating these problems. Economies don’t operate in a vacuum; their strengths and weaknesses depend on the larger political and ethical contexts of the society of which they are a part. That is why capitalism is so different in China, Russia, Brazil and Turkey than in the United States and its closest allies.

This is a truth that the founders of capitalism, like Adam Smith, recognized. Smith distinguished between enlightened and un-enlightened capitalism. Capitalism is enlightened when those who practice it bring to bear an ethical concern for others. Smith labeled this concern “moral sympathy,” which he believed to be hard-wired into our human nature.

Two centuries later we use different language but the ethical context is the same. Our giant corporations are expected to care for all of their constituents --employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers and the larger community in which they operate. This form of caring is referred to as an ethic of stewardship: a company’s top executives regard themselves as stewards of an enterprise that serves many others.

Without such an ethic, companies and individuals become exploitative; they abuse their great power for short-term gain at the expense of those they purportedly serve. Our great financial institutions, our most trusted banks and investment companies, were caught in this frenzy of uncaring, unethical, short-term, manipulative thinking that led to the Great Recession of 2007-8. It was this sort of behavior that memorably caused Goldman, Sachs to be compared to a giant vampire squid squeezing the life out of everything it touched.

No wonder our great nation now finds itself in a hole: the structural changes in our form of capitalism coincide with a marked deterioration in our social ethic of caring for others. A disastrous confluence.