The Myth of Equality and Mobility or The Death of the American Dream

If economic mobility continues to shut down, not only will we be losing the talent and leadership we need, but we will face a risk of a society of alienation and unhappiness. Even the most privileged among us will suffer the consequences of people not believing in the American dream."

The NY Times has come out with a series on the reality of the American dream and the prospect of social mobility for you and your future generations. While the article discusses some rudimentary issues in the myth of class and mobility in America today it leaves out one crucial dimension – race. Throughout the article there is discussion of wealth, income, education, and occupation but no discussion of race. Despite the fact that the study shows that American mobility is substantially nonexistent for the poor, marginal for lower to lower middleclass and nominal for the middleclass, there is no mention of the factor race plays in ones mobility or lack there of. As America becomes increasingly more rigid and the Horatio Alger mythology, that has been the hallmark of American opportunity, is shown to be nothing more than the fictions of a second generation Harvard educated, defrocked Unitarian minister, we are forced to re-evaluate the direction of our democratic experiment. I find it incredibly difficult to argue that America is becoming more equal when generational mobility may more realistically require sustained effort over five generations to make an appreciable run at the American dream. That while conservatives, moderate liberals and disgruntled others argue that the days of affirmative action have come to an end, there is no recognition that the contract was executed in bad faith – two generations to do the work of five (1968 – 2005). The article demonstrates that America is living in a fantasy world doomed to awaken in the desert of the real.

Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. It is supposed to take the sting out of the widening gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots. There are poor and rich in the United States, of course, the argument goes; but as long as one can become the other, as long as there is something close to equality of opportunity, the differences between them do not add up to class barriers. Most Americans remain upbeat about their prospects for getting ahead. A recent New York Times poll on class found that 40 percent of Americans believed that the chance of moving up from one class to another had risen over the last 30 years, a period in which the new research shows that it has not. Thirty-five percent said it had not changed, and only 23 percent said it had dropped.

The new studies of mobility, which methodically track peoples' earnings over decades, have found far less movement. The economic advantage once believed to last only two or three generations is now believed to last closer to five. Mobility happens, just not as rapidly as was once thought. In a 1987 speech, Gary S. Becker, a University of Chicago economist who would later win a Nobel Prize, summed up the research by saying that mobility in the United States was so high that very little advantage was passed down from one generation to the next. In fact, researchers seemed to agree that the grandchildren of privilege and of poverty would be on nearly equal footing. But in the past, Professor Solon added, "people would say, 'Don't worry about inequality. The offspring of the poor have chances as good as the chances of the offspring of the rich.' Well, that's not true. It's not respectable in scholarly circles anymore to make that argument."

One study, by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, found that fewer families moved from one quintile, or fifth, of the income ladder to another during the 1980's than during the 1970's and that still fewer moved in the 90's than in the 80's. A study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also found that mobility declined from the 80's to the 90's. "Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that very few people in the world have ever experienced," Professor Levine said. "Being born poor in the U.S. gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada." But beneath all that murkiness and flux, some of the same forces have deepened the hidden divisions of class. Globalization and technological change have shuttered factories, killing jobs that were once stepping-stones to the middle class. Now that manual labor can be done in developing countries for $2 a day, skills and education have become more essential than ever. This has helped produce the extraordinary jump in income inequality. The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of American households jumped 139 percent, to more than $700,000, from 1979 to 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which adjusted its numbers to account for inflation. The income of the middle fifth rose by just 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose only 9 percent.

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