The mythology of America is that anyone can make it here and escape their more humble beginnings and move up socially and financially. Once upon a time this myth was largely true, but nowadays, if one wants to enjoy social mobility, one needs to leave America and move to "Old Europe" as the Neanderthals of the Republican Party and the Tea Party nit wits like to refer to Europe which now displays more possibilities for upward social mobility than America that seems to be headed back to the Gilded Age and a society with a handful of the "haves" and vast multitudes of the "have nots." A column in the Washington Post looks at America's increasingly bleak prospects for upward social mobility. What's especially telling is that the GOP wants to slash the support programs for the poor that might otherwise allow the poor to prosper. It is the antithesis of the Gospel message that the Christofascist base of the GOP purports to worship and honor. Here are excerpts:
The American dream at its core is that a person, no matter his or her background, can make it here. A few weeks ago, four economists at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley released a path-breaking study of mobility within the United States. And last week the Journal of Economic Perspectives published a series of essays tackling the question from an international standpoint.
For more than a decade, it has been documented that Northern European countries do better at moving poor people up the ladder than the United States does. Some have dismissed these findings . . . . But Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa points out in his contribution to the Journal of Economic Perspectives that Canada is a very useful point of comparison, being much like the United States. (The percentage of foreign-born Canadians is actually higher than the percentage of foreign-born Americans, for example.) And recent research finds that people in Canada and Australia have twice the economic mobility of Americans. (The British are about the same as Americans but much worse than Canadians and Australians. )
The most important correlation in the Harvard-Berkeley study appears to be social capital. Cities with strong families, civic support groups and a community-service orientation do well on social and economic mobility. That’s why Salt Lake City — dominated by Mormons — has mobility levels that compare with Denmark’s. This would also explain why America in general fares badly; the United States has many more broken families, single parents and dysfunctional domestic arrangements than do Canada and Europe. The other notable feature in the Harvard-Berkeley study is the design of cities. Places that are segregated — where the poor live far from the middle class — do much worse than those that are more mixed.
That leaves the last large factor in explaining the low mobility: public policy. And here, Corak explains, the United States is the great outlier. Simply put, the United States spends much less on the education and well-being of poor people, especially poor children, than any other rich country — and that retards their chances of escaping poverty.
[T]he well-off in the United States spend nearly $9,000 a year on books, computers, child care and summer camps — nearly seven times what families in the bottom fifth of earners spend. In fact, this is part of what makes mobility low.
In any event, what’s apparent is that countries — and most parts of the United States — that invest heavily in all their children’s health care, nutrition and education end up with a much stronger ladder of opportunity and access. And that’s something we can change. So if we want to restore the American dream, we now have the beginnings of a path forward.
I tease at times that today's GOP is the bridge to the 11th century, but the GOP's policies seem hell bent on reestablishing the wealth disparities of the Middle Ages, with most Americans becoming serfs and peasants.t
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